My Story

MY STORY

MY STORY

KAMALA DAS

STERLING PUBLISHERS PRIVATE LTD

Jullniidiir-3 New Delhi'llOOl^

My Story

© 1976, Kamala Das

Published by S-K. Ghai, Managing I>irector, Sterling Publishers (P) Ltd.,

AB/9, Safdarjang Bnclave, New Delhi-110016

Printed at Sterling Printers, L-11, Green Park Extension,

New Dclhi-1 10016

PREFACE

My Story is my autobiography which I began writing during
my first serious bout with heart disease. The doctor thought
that writing would detract my mind from the fear of a sudden
death, and, besides, there were all the hospital bills to be taken
care of. I sent a telegram to an editor who had been after me
to write such a book to be used as a serial in his journal. He
arrived after a day bringing with him the total remuneration for
the serial. He was taking a risk, as I was then very ill and it
did not seem likely that I would be able to write more than a
few chapters. And yet, he agreed to the deal, seated near me,
holding my hand which had a green, withered look. From
that moment the book took hold of me, carrying me back into
the past rapidly as though it were a motor boat chug chugging
through the inky waters at night. Between short hours of
sleep induced by the drugs given to me by the nurses, I wrote
continually, not merely to honour my commitment but because
I wanted to empty myself of all the secrets so that I could
depart when the time came, with a scrubbed-out conscience.

My recovery was such an anti-climax! The serial had
begun to appear in the issues of the journal which flooded the
bookstalls in Kerala, My relatives were embarrassed. I had
disgraced my well-known family by telling my readers that I
had fallen in love with a man other than my lawfully wedded
husband. Why, I had even confessed that I was chronically
falling in love with persons of a flamboyant nature. When I
went for a short vacation to my home state I received no
warmth. In a hurry I escaped back to Bombay. This book
has cost me many things that I held dear, but 1 do not for a
moment regret having written it. I have written several books
in my life time, but none of them provided the pleasure the
writing of My Story has given me. I have nothing more to say.

KamaJa Das

CONTENTS

Preface

1 . The humiliation of a brown child in a European

school 1

2. About childhood nightmares and the only “good

friend” 4

3. Each poem of mine made me cry 7

4. Nalapat House gifted by amorous chieftain 10

5. In the secret drawer was a brown bottle which

smelt of Ambergris 14

6. I was infatuated with his charm 17

7. Women of good Nair families never mentioned sex 21

8. Lonely Goddess 24

9. They would have liked him to go to bed with a

ghost every night 28

10. She was half-crazed with love and hardly noticed

me 32

1 1 . The girls in boarding schools came from a very

dilBferent background 36

12. Homely Annie gets handsome young lover ! 40

13. The nuns used to censor the letters we wrote 44

14. “I wanted to marry a rich man... to be a snob” 48

15. We were subjected to subtle sadism of several

kinds 5 i

16. I prayed to the Sun God to give me a male child 55

17. One morning the Sanyasi had gone... only the smell

of opium remained 58

18. Was every married adult a clown in bed, a circus

performer ? 62

19. Her voice was strange.,, it was easy for me to fall

in love with her 66

20. She lay near me, holding my body close to hers 70

21. His hands bruised my body and left blue and red

marks on the skin 74

22. Wedding night : Again and again he hurt me and

all the while the Kathakali drums throbbed dully 79

23. A gold coin for love 83

24. I sent the cook out to get some barbiturates 87

25. The blood-stained moonlight 91

26. The first chapter of darkness 95

27. For the first time in my life I learned to surrender

totally 99

28. My love was like alms looking for a begging bowl 103

29. I still yearned for my grey-eyed friend 107

30. Sex and the co-operative movement 111

31. He walked in silence for a few yards ahead of me... 115

32. It was the beginning of delightful death 120

33. Passing away of my great grandmother 124

34. Again and again the same man phoned 127

35. Calcutta’s cocktail season 130

36. I was Carlo’s Sita 134

37. For the first time I saw the eunuchs dance in

Calcutta 137

38. Delhi streets were fragrant and murky...! felt very

young 141

39. Calicut gets a good crop of lunatics 145

40. Like the phoenix I rose from the ashes of my past 150

41. I withdrew into the cave I had made for myself 154

42. The last of my lovers : handsome dark one with a

tattoo between his eyes 158

43. “I too tried adultery for a short while” 162

44. I was never a nymphomaniac... 167

45. Return to Nalapat : Was my 24-year-oId marriage

on the rocks? 171

46. Only the wealthy hated lust me... they spread lush

scandals about me 177

47. The sorcerer came on a bike at night... 181

48. The ancient hungers that once tormented me were

fulfilled 185

49. Who were we to sit beside their favourite God ? 189

50. I have ceased to fear death... 193

1

The humiliation of a brown child in a
European school

When I was a little child growing up in Calcutta, the British
still ruled India. But in good society they behaved like our
equals. It was normal for a British family to have one or two
close friends among the Indians with whom they were on visit-
ing terms.

My father’s superior at that time was a balding, redfaced
gentleman named Ross who called my father “my good friend
Nair” whenever he came to our house, thrilling all of us to our
very bones.

When we went once to Malabar for a month’s stay with my
grandmother, we lent our cook to Mrs. Ross so that she might
teach him the rudiments of European cookery. With every
vacation that we took, our cook advanced more and more in
the culinary arts until our eating habits had to be altered to suit
his sophistication.

Instead of the rice and curry, he served us soups, cutlets and
a stew. For my mother he cooked a plate of rice and , lentils
because he felt that it was too late to change her tastes. My
father ate with a fork and knife. The children, my elder brother
and I, eating early and unsupervised, ate Western meals with
our little brown fingers, licking our hands, enjoying all that was
served on our plates while the cook stood by, frowning. He
thought us savages.

My father was always busy with his work at the automobile
firm where he was employed, selling Rolls Royces, |fumbers

2

MY STORY

and Bentleys to the Indian princes and their relatives. My mother,
vague and indifferent, spent her time lying on her stomach on a
large four-post bed, composing poems in Malayalam. We had
no full-time maid at that time. The cook took us to the Euro-
pean school a furlong away and brought us back in the after-
noon.

He was not of an affectionate nature. So we grew up more
or less neglected, and because we were aware of ourselves as
neglected children in a social circle that pampered the young,
there developed between us a strong relationship of love, the
kind a leper may feel for his mate who pushed him on a hand-
cart when they went on their begging rounds.

My brother was plump and dark. His eyes were bright and
circular. Although he was the cleverest in his class, the white
boys made fun of him and tortured him by pushing a pointed
pencil up his nostril. One day his shirt-front was covered with
blood. He was stunned by the cruelty but even the tears seem-
ed inhibited, staying suspended on his lashes while William the
bully exclaimed “Blackie, your blood is red”. I scratched his
face in a mad rage, but was soon overpowered by the tough
Anglo-Indians who were always on the other side, fighting for
the white man’s rights. We did not tell our parents of the
tortures we underwent at school for wearing, under the school
uniform of white twill, a nut-brown skin.

Occasionally the school would get a distinguished visitor, a
bird of bright plumage alighting for a short while, a Govern-
or’s wife, a white moustached admiral or a lady in grey silks
claiming relationship with the family at Buckingham Palace.

I do not know how our lady-principal, whom we called
Madam, managed to lure such august personages in. Ours was
not a big school. Perhaps it was because we sang the National
Anthem, Rule Britannia, louder than the others. In the morn-
ing while Madam sat at the grand piano on which stood the
tinted photograph of the British royal family and we raised our
voices in song, singing Britons never never shall be slaves, even
the postman slowed his walk to listen. King George the sixth,
(God save his soul) used to wink at us from the gilt frame, as

KAMALA DAS

3

though he knew that the British were singing in India their
swan song

Shirley Temple was the rage then with her golden ringlets
and her toothy smile. All the little girls copied her. Our
school hung her picture on the wall behind the piano. We had
in my class another Shirley. A Scot with pink cheeks and
yellow ringlets. When the dignitaries arrived, it was always
Shirley who carried up the bouquet.

Once she was asked to read a poem that I had composed
and when the visitor asked who wrote it, our principal said,
Shirley of course, she is a combination of beauty and brains,
and then there was from the Governor’s wife a special kiss.
What a bright little moppet, she said.

When the visitors came the brown children were always
discreetly hidden away, swept under the carpet, told to wait in
the corridor behind the lavatories where the school ayahs kept
them company. None of us looked too pretty in those days.
There were six in all, counting Louis the black Anglo-Indian
who could not make up his mind which side to take. If we
were hated by the white children, poor Louis was hated more
but he followed them about, clowning to put them in good
humour, barking like a dog and neighing like an ass

2

About childhood nightmares and the
only ^^good friend’^

In the year 1928 when my father got married, Mahatma
Gandhi’s influence was at its highest. The simplicity that he
preached appealed to the middle classes. My father soon
after the betrothal stipulated firmly that his wife was not to
wear anything but Khaddar and preferably white or ofF-white.

After the wedding he made her remove all the gold orna-
ments from her person, all except the ‘mangalsutra’. To her it
must have seemed like taking to widow’s weeds, but she did
not protest. She was mortally afraid of the dark stranger who
had come forward to take her out of the village and its secu-
rity. She was afraid of her father and afraid of her uncle,
the two men who plotted and conspired to bring for the first
time into the family a bridegroom who neither belonged to any
royal family nor was a Brahmin.

The Nalapat family’s financial position at that time was pre-
carious. All the jewellery had been sold for fighting off litiga-
tion and bankruptcy. My father was not an ideal landlord. He
worked for his living in Calcutta. This was a point in his
favour.

When the young couple left for Calcutta my grandmother
went along with them to get them settled. My mother did not
fall in love with my father. They were dissimilar and horribly
mismated. But my mother’s timidity helped to create an illusion
of domestic harmony which satisfied the relatives and friends.
Out of such an arid union were bom the first two children, my

KAMALA DAS

5

brother and I, bearing the burden of a swarthy skin and ordi-
nary features.

We must have disappointed our parents a great deal. They
did not tell us so, but in every gesture and in every word it was
evident. It was evident on the days when my father roared at
us and struggled to make us drink the monthly purgative of
pure castor oil. This used to be one of our childhood night-
mares, the ordeal of being woken out of sleep before dawn to
have the ounce-glass thrust into our mouths and rough hands
holding our lips closed so that we swallowed the stuff and sank
back on our pillows with tears of humiliation streaming from
our eyes....

Gradually our instincts told us to keep away from the lime-
light, to hide in the vicinity of the kitchen where we could hold
together the tatters of our self-respect and talk to the scavenger
or the gardener who brought for the brass flower vases of our
drawing room bunches of marigolds or astors every morning,
plucking them from the old European cemetery behind our
house.

We lived on the top floor of the repair-yard of the motor
car company. One had to climb thirty-six steps to reach our
flat, Midway, there was to the right an opening which led on
to the servants’ quarters where night and day a faucet leaked
noisily, sadly. There was a stench of urine which made one
pause precisely on that step of the staircase wondering where it
came from.

But upstairs in the drawing room where visitors came so
rarely there was the smell of starch and flowers. We had white
Khaddar curtains that were taken down and changed every
fortnight. My brother and I on holidays sat near the full-sized
windows looking out and at times dangling some rubber toy on
a string to intrigue the passers-by. If someone tugged at the
string, we pulled it up in a hurry and hid in the bedroom fearing
deliciously that he may come up to grab us. It was an enthral-
ling pastime.

We had only one good friend, just one friend who liked to
touch our bauds and talk to us about life in general- This was

6

MY STORY

a burly gent named Menon who worked as the Stores Manager
of the Motor Car company. When our mother slept in the
warm afternoons we slipped out of the house to visit him while
he sat at his table ordering long tumblers of frothy tea which
he drank blowing on it and wetting his handle-bar moustache.

At that time there was a Malayali family who were friendly
with ours. They had two sons and the youngest of them, a
puny, pale child had a doll’s house which he once showed off
when we visited him. Of this I spoke to our friend Menon and
perhaps he felt moved, for in a month’s time he brought for me
a large doll’s house complete with dainty furniture which he
had whittled all by himself. This was placed on the round table
which had the brass top, and at night when the lights were
switched on, it shone in all its varnished glory like a Taj Mahal.
The friend’s house was a hut compared to ours. Off and on we
ran into the drawing room to take just another peek into the
dining room, or to smell the red paint of the roof.

When the western windows of the drawing room were open-
ed the corrugated roof of the factory came into view. On this,
noisily pattered the feet of the monkeys who lived on the trees
of the cemetery. Occasionally one of them would creep into
our house and steal a coconut or a loaf of bread from the ki-
tchen. One day while the cook was shouting obscenities at the
thieving ape the scavenger said, “Thakur, don’t speak so to
any monkey. He may be Lord Hanuman himself, come to test
your devotion.”

The cook was not at all religious. He made fun of all the
Hindu Gods, hurting the sentiments of the occasional maid and
the scavenger. One day the scavenger said that the cook ought
to go to Vilayat and settle down there, he was such a Saheb.
“Yes, I will,” said the cook. “Mrs. Ross, the white Memsaheb
will take me to England as her cook if I tell her that I am will-
ing to leave this country.” The scavenger gave a sceptical smile.
Ram Ram, he muttered, drinking tea in an enamel mug that
was kept aside for him....

3

Each poem of mine made me cry

On our way to school on some privileged days the cook used
to get for us the narrow limp strips of Nestles’ chocolate which
came in wrappings of glazed red paper with a coloured photo
of the British royal family tucked inside its second layer. We
collected enough to be able to demand an album from the
dealer.

We had also the habit of collecting cuttings from the news-
papers for a political album. This contained all the photographs
of Hitler and Mussolini who were undoubtedly the greatest
heroes in our eyes at that time. The newspapers gave their
speeches maximum coverage, built them up into supermen. We
secretly hoped to be like them when we grew up.

At this time my brother thought it a good idea to start a
manuscript magazine. None of our contemporaries could turn
out essays or poems because they felt diffident about their spell-
ing, So the responsibility fell on my shoulders.

I was six and very sentimental. I wrote sad poems about
dolls who lost their heads and had to remain headless for eter-
nity. Each poem of mine made me cry. My brother illustrated
the verses and wrote faintly political articles.

We had two tutors. Mabel, a pretty Anglo-Indian and
Nambiar, the Malayalam tutor. The cook was partial to the
lady, served her tea on a tray with tiny sandwiches laid out on
a quarter-plate, and to Nambiar who came much later in the
evening he gave only a glass-tumbler of tea and a few sardonic
remarks. Nambiar, in our house, moved about with a heavy

8

MY STORY

inferiority complex and would hide behind the side-board when
my father passed through the dining room where we had our
Malayalam lessons. We learnt our vernacular only to be able
to correspond with our grandmother who was very fond of us.

One day all the children of our school were taken to the
Victoria Gardens for a picnic. We were given sugarcane-juice
and ham-sandwiches which, being vegetarian I threw away be-
hind the flowering bushes. The young school-mistress kept
shrieking out “Oh Archie, Oh. Archie” every now and then to
the dark history-teacher while he tried most unsuccessfully to
grab her and kiss her. She ran round the trees escaping his
clutches, all the while laughing gaily as though it was a big
joke.

I went away to the farthest fence and lay near a hedge of
Henna which had sprouted its tiny flowers. The sun was white
that day, a white lamp of a sun on the winter sky, I was lonely.
Oh I was so lonely that day. No one seemed to want my com-
pany, not even my brother who was playing a kind of football
with his classmates. Helen, the only girl who could dance, was
telling the others of the film called “The Blue Bird.” I wonder-
ed why I did not join the girls who crowded around her.

I wondered why I was born to Indian parents instead of to
a white couple, who may have been proud of my verses. Then
suddenly like the clatter of pots and pans, harsh words attacked
my privacy. What on earth are you doing here Kamala, shouted
the teacher. Why don’t you join the others ? What a peculiar
child you are. And the white sun filled my eyes with its own
loneliness. The smell of Henna flowers overwhelmed me. Sob-
bing, I rose and walked toward my teacher. The children stared
at me. The teacher laughed, and as though it was a signal for
them to begin laughing too, they broke into high laughter. The
birds on the trees flew away

In the afternoon occasionally I slipped out of the gate while
the fat watchman slept soundly on his charpoy and walked to
the old cemetery. The tombstones were like yellowed teeth
and even the writing had faded with the rains of half a century.
But it was thrilling to read the words that had not faded and to

KAMALA DAS

9

know that Elizabeth Hardinge was borne in 1818 but died in
1938. Who was Elizabeth ? Who was Roger Upton who died
only at the age of eighty-three ? Who was Rosamund ? Except
for monkej'S I was the only living creature there, bxit the red
bougainvillae, gaudy as spilt blood, that had climbed the mina-
rets, swung in the breeze. The marigolds dipped their heads in
curtsy. The monkeys ignored me and suckled their young.

I was too young to know about ghosts. It was possible for
me to love the dead as deeply as I loved the living. I could
even go up to the un-known Rosamund and confide in her.
From the dead no harshness could emanate, no cruelty —

4

Nalapat House gifted by amorous chieftain

When the Second World War threatened to grow into an
interminable horror my father decided to send us to our ances-
tral home in Malabar which was called the Nalapat House.

The house, though not large by the local standards, had an
inner courtyard and a temple situated inside the main hall which
opened out to the south. There was a gatehouse which had a
steep staircase running up to the luxuriously furnished bedroom
where my grand uncle slept at night, a portico supported by pil-
lars that led on to a higher portico where the Ottanthullal dan-
cers performed several times a year, a hall where the men sat
down to eat their meals, a dining hall for the women of the
house, the servants’ quarters, three small bedrooms on the
ground floor, three bedrooms on the first floor overlooking a
narrow verandah and an attic where the old trunks and palan-
quins were stored.

To the south of the house was the snake-shrine which was
at least two thousand years old, where the idols of Renuka and
her father Vasuki were worshipped and beyond that stretched
the regions of the dead, the Sradhappura, the house built for
cooking food for the dead on their death anniversaries,
and the coconut estate where after each cremation a tree was
planted in memory of the newly deceased. There was a bath
house near the pond and a crocodile that came out in the
afternoon after the servants had also finished their baths, to lie
in the sun with its mouth open to trap the dragon-flies.

To the north there were the usual cattle-sheds and the grain-
husking yard. Above all those structures like a green canopy

KAMALA DAS

11

hung the leaves of the naany trees that my ancestress Kunji had
planted during her honeymoon days. Large trees bearing flow-
ers or fruits threw scatter-rugs of green shadow all around the
house where we played throughout the day, my brother and I.

The house was gifted to my ancestress, the 15-year-old Kunji
by her new and doting husband after she had come to his vil-
lage, fleeing from the burning city of Cochin, where she had
gone with her uncles to attend a relative’s wedding. An aristo-
crat was to be shown to her at Cochin who was to marry her if
she liked his face and if her uncles approved of his deportment.

But the English East India Company was not aware of all
those delicious schemes, when they decided to blow up the most
important trade-port to weaken the power of the Dutch from
whom they had just then wrested the city. It was at that time
beautiful with well-laid-out streets and gardens. The Portuguese
churches had been transformed into warehouses by the Dutch
who were not religious but were artistic enough to call their
streets by musical names like de Linde Straat and de Bloomen-
daal Straat.

To spite the Dutch and their last Indian Governor, Von
Spall, the English Governor blew up with gunpowder the mag-
nificent warehouses and the residences of the traders and the
Nair barons. Women and children perished in the blaze. The
ones who escaped from the burning city with the connivance of
the English and their secret allies were too dazed to speak of
their ordeal.

Kunji, accompanied by a servant, bearing two Dutch trunks
painted red and gold, made her way towards home, the princi-
pality of Alengad which included Alwaye but was made to change
her route by an amorous chieftain who brought her over to
his village and married her. He was well-versed in Astrology
and Architecture. He chose the site for the Nalapat House
and designed it.

To the east lay lush paddy-fields and also to the north. From
the west the blue and frothy Arabian Sea roared at night. Near
the snake-shrine was the rare Nirmatala tree which burst into

12

MY STORY

bloom every summer with large butter-coloured flowers that fil-
led even the inner rooms with perfume.

When we went there as children, the Nalapat House had
seven occupants, not counting the servants. My grandmother,
my aunt Ammini, my grand uncle, the poet, my great grand-
mother, her two sisters and Mahatmaji.

Will Mahatmaji approve, whispered the old ladies of the
household to one another at the beginning of any activity. It
was as if Mahatma Gandhi was the head of the Nalapat House.
His photographs hung in every room. Even the servants felt
his presence in the house and began wearing Khaddar.

My grandmother spun Khadi yarn on a thakli holding it
aloft over her head in the afternoon, while the others slept and
the old windows creaked in the heat. She was plumb, fair-skin-
ned and good-looking. Her throat, whenever I nestled close to
her, smelled of sandal wood. She told me of the trip the ladies
of the family once made to Gunivayoor to donate their jewellery
to the Harijan Fund.

Mahatmaji had talked in Hindi and in English which they
could not anyway understand, but his smile hypnotised them.
All the jewellery was given away. I thought of Gandhiji as a
brigand, although I did not speak my mind then. I thought it
his diabolic aim to strip the ladies of all their finery so that they
became plain and dull. Austerity seemed meaningless at that
time of my life. And, a cruel practical joke !

My aunt Ammini was an attractive woman who kept turning
down all the marriage proposals that came her way. She wore
only white Khaddar and did not use oil on her wavy hair. She
chose to lead the life of an ascetic, but when she was alone in
her bedroom facing the fragrant Parijatam tree she sat on the
window sill and recited the love-songs written by Kumaranasan,
whose poetry was fashionable then. It was while listening to
her voice that I sensed for the first time that love was a beauti-
ful anguish and a thapasya

My grand uncle Narayana Menon was a famous poet-philo-
sopher. He occupied the portico where the easy chairs were
placed and the table with the heavy books. There was above

KAMALA DAS

13

his chair a punkah made of wood and covered with calico rufla-
es, which a servant seated far away could move by pulling on
its string. Beside his chair was a hookah which my grand-
aunt meticulously cleaned every morning. Grand uncle looked
every inch a king, although he did not have enough money even
to buy the books that he wished to read.

To the south of the portico was the grilled library ruled by
an ill-assorted group consisting of Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, Havelock
Ellis and Varahamihira. The Nalapat House had the finest lib-
rary of palm leaf manuscripts, most of which were written in
the Vattezhuthu that probably came to Malabar from the Phoe-
nicians.

My grand uncle must have been a lonely man, for he had
no friend living nearby who could discuss with him the subjects
he was interested in. With the callers he talked about the petty
scandals floating about in the literary world and laughed enga-
gingly, clapping his pink palms. He was witty and eloquent
and even toward the end of his life when cataract made reading
impossible, he remained cheerful, trying to turn his attention to
the study of classical music.

At my grand uncle’s evening durbar there were occasionally
brilliant grammarians and writers who came from long distances
to slay with him, but they were tongue-tied, and awed by his
presence.

5

In the secret drawer was a brown bottle
which smelt of Ambergris

My great grandmother’s younger sister was a poetess. I
read her verses only thirty years after she died. When I went
as a six-year-old to stay with the old people at Nalapat, she was
lying paralyzed in the dark bedroom next to the servants’ quar-
ters. She lay like a broken doll, a pale-faced toy, thrown hap-
hazardly on the bed by a child in a hurry, but her eyes, mira-
culously left unclouded by the disease, moved continually feed-
ing themselves with an odd and greed on those who came near
her.

When the feeding was done and the rubber sheets changed,
the adults of the house left her alone, murmuring, go to sleep.
But sleep seemed alien to her, for even at midnight while my
grandmother sleepily walked to the kitchen to fetch me a glass
of water I used to look in and find the sick one’s limpid eyes
wide open. Her name was Ammalu. It was not seemly for a
Nair child to call an aged relative by name but I called her
Ammalu. She could not protest anyway. Quite often on holi-
days I sat on her bed, on the squeaking rubber sheets, telling
her of my classmates. At times her lips trembled a little as
though she wished to make a comment but no sound issued
forth. She communicated with her eyes, within which little
flames leapt up each time I entered her room and took her hand
in mine.

The old ladies of the house told me of Ammalu’s passion for
order. She was a spinster who chose to remain unmarried al-

KAMALA DAS

15

though pretty and eligible. She was finicky about cleanliness
and bathed thrice a day. It was difficult to find her at any
hour of the day without a dampness in her hair, and without a
sprig of basil in its curls. She read profusely and scribbled in
the afternoon while the others had their siesta behind shuttered
windows, lying sprawled on thin reed-mats on the cool black
floor. She spoke very little and went out only to attend the
annual Ekadasi festival of the Guruvayur temple. Sitting con-
cealed behind the wooden rails of a verandah she watched the
procession of caparisoned elephants which thrilled her. The
tattoo of the temple drums and the wail of the sacred conch, she
heard with a smile. She was deeply devout and spent the grey
hours of dusk in prayer.

Finally the cold baths destroyed her. Paralysis struck her
without a warning during the monsoon while she had just got
out of the pond after her morning bath. She collapsed in a
heap emitting a loud scream. This cry, agonized as a tortured
bird’s, was the last sound she produced in her life. For two
years, until I came on the scene, she lay still, enjoying the com-
panionship of the sparrows that flew into her room, tweeting
comfortingly. I became her cherished friend, for there was
nothing that I could not tell her. If she smiled a smile at all,
behind that closed face of hers, I saw its gleam in the eyes.

One day when I returned from the Elementary School where
I had been admitted, I saw her lie all wrapped up in unbleached
cotton, on the floor inside a large rectangle decorated with
grains of rice and burning wicks nestling in coconut-halves. What
is she doing here, I asked my grandmother. Only the pale face
was visible, and the eyes were closed. Prostrate yourself at her
feet, said my grandmother, she is leaving us. Ammalu is dead,
whispered my brother. Then we were hustled out and told to
stay upstairs until the next morning. I missed my evening
monologue with the paralyzed one.

Won’t she ever get up from there, I asked my brother. You
are a fool, said my brother, she is dead and soon they will burn
her. Then I broke down. They were already cutting down the
heavy branches of the mango tree that stood as a sentinel out-
side her window, and before dusk we saw the white smoke rise

16

MY STORY

up in the southern compound near the damson tree. The South
West breezes wafted in, burdened with a sweet stench of human
flesh. Is Ammalu burning there, I asked my brother, and he
solemnly nodded.

Nearly a year ago I returned to the Nalapat house, a
middle-aged woman, broken by life’s bitter trophies, and
found among the old books some containing Ammalu’s poems.
I dusted the notebooks and carried them up to my room. Most
of the poems were about KRISHNA. To Him she had been
faithful. My chastity is my only gift to 3’ou, oh Krishna, she
wrote in her last poem. Her writings disturbed me. I felt that
after thirty years she was trying once again to communicate with
the world and with me. There are no photographs to refresh
my memory. Only the leaves of her books, yellowed like aut-
umn-leaves lying on my desk, and a wooden chest which once
held her clothes. And in the secret drawer of her writing box,
a brown bottle shaped like a pumpkin that smells faintly of
Ambergris

The Nairs believe that the dead return for their treasur-
ed possessions and therefore they throw away or gift away to
the poor all the clothes and other possessions of the dead as
soon as the cremation is over. The gold ornaments are hastily
melted and reshaped for the living, changing the design so
totally that the ghost-owner does not get a chance to stake a
claim. When we die, we die. On the site of my pyre my sons
shall plant a coconut tree. Then some day one of my descen-
dants may go up to the tree and rub her palm against its bark
as I went up to poor Ammalu’s tree and caressed it, murmuring
futile messages to the dead....

6

1 was infatuated with his charm

When I joined the Elementary School at Punnayurkulam,
which was only two furlongs away from the Nalapat House, I
felt that I had died a cultural death and was getting reborn into
another kind of world where the hard-eyed British were no
longer my co -rivals.

The children of our own field-hands and carpenters, dressed
only in thin towels, were my new school-mates. One of them,
the boy who shared a bench with me was Velu, who was always
bleary eyed and had sores all over his body. His parents were
respectable beggars who used to visit our house every morning
for a handful of rice. ' Velu was yellow with malnutrition. On
birthdays we used to organize a beggars’ feast for which Velu
used to come, tugged in by his father who twisted his ears to
show off in front of us his parental privileges!

Two wooden pots of rice-gruel were placed in the compound
under the largest ma%o tree and a cauldron of red curry. For
the children there would be as an added delicacy, a big salted
mango which the maidservants ladled out from the old tall urns
that were kept inside the pantry. Give another mango to Velu,
I used to shout to the servants who were in charge of the distri-
bution, give more gruel to Velu, give more of the curry.... And,
Velu, the sore-eyed, many-scabbed guest, would flash a friendly
smile in my direction.

Another school-mate was plump Devaki, who once wrote
me a love letter and handed it to me most furtively, hiding
behind the school privy. “Don’t read it now”, she said, “take it

18

MY STOKY

home and read it when you are alone. I have unloaded my
mind, my heart and my soul.” I was mystified by the words.
When I reached home and my grandmother found the letter in
my pocket, she did not allow me to read it beyond the pening
sentence, “my dearest darling.” My grandmother was very
upset. She told me that I was not to associate with Devaki
who had proved herself to be wicked, writing such letters to
innocents like me.

After the week-end when Devaki asked me for a reply I lied
to her that I was not yet proficient enough in Malayalam to be
able to write a letter and that probably before the year was out
I would be writing her a long loving letter. She grew bored
with me and turned for emotional solace to an older girl. They
exchanged love letters in the privy every morning for months
until one day the Maths teacher caught them at it and scolded
them.

There was a boy in the eighth standard which was adjacent
to my class in the same dusty hall. He was considered an out-
law by the teachers who took a sadistic delight in punishing
him every day. He was handsome and had a dimple on his
right cheek which appeared only when he smiled. I could
hardly take my eyes off his face. I was so infatuated with his
charm. Once when he wrote some obscenity at recess on the
blackboard, the class-master slapped him hard. I could, from
my class, see the red weals on his cheek. Govinda Kurup, the
outlaw, merely smiled and muttered something to his bench-
mate, making him blush and hang down his head. Get out of
the class, shouted the angry teacher, Goisinda Kurup, leave the
class immediately. The boy kilted up his dhoti and walked
away whistling. At that moment I wanted to follow him and
tell him that if he were wicked, T was fond of wickedness too....

One day I told my grandmother, lying close to her at night,
I want to marry Govinda Kurup. Don’t be stupid, said my
grandmother, but she laughed and seemed amused. One after-
noon during our summer vacation, we were seated on the ledge
of the snakeshrine playing with dice when we saw Govinda
Kurup enter the gate and walk towards us. There were six of
us, my brother and I, and four of our cousins who lived nearby.

KAMALA DAS

19

I do not know what prompted Govinda Kxirup to enter a stran-
ger’s house, but he seemed to be in high spirits, and started to
tell us of a practical joke he played on the Sewing Mistress of
the School.

When his voice rose in enthusiasm I was terrified, for I knew
that my grand-uncle did not like to be disturbed in his siesta.
A few minutes later grand uncle did come down to roar at the
intruder. Who is this urchin, shouted grand-uncle, who invited
him here ? My grand uncle, although a poet and a philosopher,
was an utter snob. He believed in prescribing for the lower
middle classes and the poor a decorum that we, by the happy
fact of our high descent, did not have to observe. He showed
them their places. He was also impatient with people who were
unintelligent. But he was kind to the children of the family.
He used to bring us from Trichur copying pencils picked up
from his publishers.

My grand-uncle liked to see women glamorized with jewels
and flowers. His second wife, my favourite aunt, was never seen
even at night without her heavy jewellery, all gem-encrusted and
radiant, and the traditional cosmetics of the Nair woman, the
dab of turmeric on the cheeks, the sandal-line on the forehead,
the collyrium in the eye and the betel in the mouth. She used
a perfume that was popular then with the Muslims, called Otto
dil Bahar. Her house, the Ambazeth House, w^as the first large
house to sprout in the vicinity of ours. She was the daughter
of a very wealthy Zamindar who believed in sending his child-
ren off to Britain to pick up their education, so she could have
made a much more gainful marriage, but for the fact that she
had leucodermic spots on her body which she kept concealed
for some years taking baths in the bathroom, while the other
ladies splashed about merrily in the family pond.

When the spots spread to the arms she confided in my
grand uncle who married her out of compassion. There deve-
loped between the two a strong bond that was radically sex-
based. My grand-uncle had written at that time a book on sex,
the ‘Rati Samrajya’ which was an academic study based on the
writings of Havelock Ellis and the Indian sexologists.

20

MY STORY

I have heard my grand uncle tell his wife that she was the
most empty-headed woman he had known. She used to laugh
melodiously at such comments. At night she enslaved him with
her voluptuous body. So she could well aiford to humour him
in the day. Each night she came to our house accompanied by
her maids and a lantern, looking like a bride. And, she walked
up the steep staircase of the gatehouse to meet her famous
husband in their lush bedroom, kept fragrant with license and
jasmine-garlands

7

Women of good Nair families never
mentioned sex

Until my wedding-night I did not have the slightest know-
ledge of what went on between men and women in the process
of procreation. Sex was not a fashionable word then as it is
now, but its followers were certainly not inactive.

We had at the Nalapat House a kitchen-maid who used to
flirt continually with the cook who had decided anyway to make
her his wife as soon as his chit-fund matured to render him rich
enough to buy the wedding-finery. The marriage of the Nairs,
particularly that of the, poorer ones, was extremely simple, the
ritual lasting only a minute or two, for, all that the man had to
do was to hand over to the woman a length of cloth and when
she accepted it she became his wife.

Cloth was presumably an expensive commodity in olden
Malabar and was precious. It was not easy then for the heads
of the matriarchal families to clothe daintily the nieces, although
the girls required only two and a half yards as underwear and
two yards as overwear. The breasts were covered solely by the
heavy 'necklaces they wore.

Our cook planned to take a trip to the bazars of Trichur to
pick the bridal muslins and he kept pratting on and on about
his exotic plans until the girl’s patience grew thin. It was dur-
ing this period of discontent that her swinging gait caught the
fancy of a rich relative of ours who began to lure her into a
vacant house every noon to coax her to part with her morals.
When his ardour grew he began, Profumo-wise, to write little

22

MY STORY

missiles of letters shooting them at her while she walked beneath
his balcony. One of those cloying dispatches fell into the hands
of my grandmother who promptly dismissed the girl from our
service.

The cook then began to steal out in the evenings to visit and
console the erring wench. One day while he was returning from
a temple-festival, the rich man’s henchmen pounced upon him
and throwing rocks at him, wounded him. He came to our
house stumbling over the steps, blind with the blood flowing in-
to his eyes and onto his naked chest. My grandmother was
horrified. She thrust a fistful of granulated sugar into the
wound on his forehead, stemming the flow. He mumbled his
rival’s name and fell asleep on the wooden garner in which we
stored the oilcakes for our cows. In the morning there was
only some congealed blood on the garner where he lay and he
had vanished.

When my grandmother sent a servant to his village to seek
him out his parents told him that he had not come there at all.
The servants scraped the blood off the garner with a knife and
washed it with some water mixed with cow-dung. It was as if
some wild beast, a carnivore, had come there in the night and
had had its kill. The rich man stopped seeing our former
kitchen-maid and soon married a moon-faced cousin who
quarreled with him every night, sobbing so hysterically that his
uncles had to knock at his bedroom’s door and intervene.

No wonder the women of the best Nair families never men-
tioned sex. It was their principal phobia. They associated it
with violence and bloodshed. They had been fed on the stories
of Ravana who perished due to his desire forSita and of Kicha-
ka, who was torn to death by Draupadi’s legal husband Bhima
only because he coveted her. It was customary for the Nair
girl to marry when she was hardly out of her childhood and it
was also customary for the much older husband to give her a
ride shock by his sexual haste on the wedding-night. The only
heroine whose sex-life seemed comparatively untumultuous was
Radha who waited on the banks of Jumna for her blueskinned
lover. But she was another’s wife and so an adulteress. / In

KAMALA DAS

23

the orbit of licit sex, there seemed to be only crudeness and
violence.

The next kitchen maid to arrive at Nalapat was the pale
Kunhukutty who came from a village across the Connolly
canal, ferried in by a barge, and she carried with her a bundle of
clothes. She was short in stature and had a fine tracery of
blue veins on her throat. My grandmother was satisfied with
her deportment. She spoke only in monosyllables and in a nasal
voice that reminded us of a pig. She was a hearty eater but on
some evenings she went behind the cattle-shed and vomited all
that she ate.

One day I followed her and stood behind her watching while
she threw up noisily and wiped the perspiration from her face
with the corner of her dhoti. What is wrong with you, I asked
her. It is nothing, she said. I ate a lot of green tamarind
today, and that is why I am sick. Every time I eat green tama-
rind I get sick. Don’t tell yomr grandmother about it.... And, I
asked her why she insisted on eating green tamarind when she
knew how bad it was for her system. I am not educated like all
of you, I don’t know English or anything like that, she said. I
am only a poor and ignorant girl. What can a girl like me do
but be foolish

I thought her an awful fool. -One or two months later I
woke from my sleep in the morning hearing a commotion down-
stairs. Change your clothes and get out this minute, shouted
my grandmother at Kunhukutty who stood in a pool of blood
outside her dingy room. I looked around. The walls were
spattered with blood. What has happened, I asked my grand-
mother. She only gave me a shove.

In half an hour’.s time Kunhukutty was ready with her bun-
dle and all, to take leave of us, and, the field-hand who was
assigned the responsibility of putting her on the ferry-boat
muttered profanities waiting at the gate. It was obvious to me
that the kitchen-maid had fallen from favour. I did not know
what her crime was. It seemed more like an accident to me.
Had she fallen from the rafters and hurt herself ?

24

MY STORY

Later the cook told me that she was only an immoral woman
and that she had conducted on herself an abortion. The
words were new to me and made no sense. Your grandmother
is too good a person to suspect anything ill of anybody, said
the cook. The moment I saw this one walking in with her
dirty bundle I knew she was bad. But who ever listens to my
advice ?

8

Lonely Goddess

Beyond the northern rice-fields lived Lazar, the oil-seller
who drove his white cow and the three women of his house
round and round his old mill, to extract oil from the copra and
the sesame while he rested, leaning against a tree, abusing them
in pornographic language which only amused his victims, for he
was always a good provider and they were, by nature, masochis-
tic.

He had gifted to each of them gold-chains and heavy earrings.
He was a heavy drinker, but the oil from his mill was unadul-
terated. The sesame oil was frothy and sweet-smelling. )

^ 1

The wealthy ladies of the locality bought it for their oil-
baths and mixed it with turmeric and sandalwood to make an
unguent that was supposed to keep their skin golden and wrin-
kle-free. Lazar’s son, who was a matriculate, carried the oil i
from door to door, but he was too conscious of his formal edu-
cation to make any special effort to sell. The ladies appreciated
his difficulty and bought the oil without haggling over its price.
They were born hagglers, enjoying a good debate when the other
pedlars arrived, carrying with them their wares, the glass-bang-
les, the reed-mats and the seasonal vegetables.

Behind Lazar’s house were the thatched huts of the Pariahs
who were by profession basket-weavers and sorcerers. Their
women wore around their necks, strands of red beads and left
their breasts uncovered. The poor people approached them for
love-potions and for promise to destroy by terror their enemies.
Therefore the Pariahs were regarded as outcastes and kept at a
distance. But in the month of Makaram, between January and

26

MY STORY

February, they attained a sudden importance, for it was the
month set aside for the worship of Kali to whom, being abori-
ginals, the Pariahs were dearly beloved.

It was in Makaram that they dressed themselves to look like
her and came to our houses to dance. They wore gleaming
breasts of brass, jingling anklets and large wigs of tarred palm-
leaves. They were accompanied by the drummers and the reed-
pipe players whose wail lashed at us like a ribbon of pain in
the hot noon.

When Kali danced, we felt in the region of the heart an un-
ease and a leap of recognition. Deep inside, we held the know-
ledge that Kali was older than the world and that having killed
for others, she was now lonelier than all. All our primal ins-
tincts rose, to sing in our blood, the magical incantations, Om
Aim Hrim Klim Mahadurge Navakshari Navadurge Navaimike
Navachandi Mahamaye Mahayoganidre, darkness spawning
light, night that begets the day, shame that fractures the oracle’s
voice and, blood’s spilt roses in the sacrarium, Rupcan Dehi
Sriyam Dehi Yaso Dehi Dvisho Jahi.

In the month of Makaram, all the Bhagavati shrines sprang
to life and blazed with their thousand lamps. Long lines of
young women carrying in their hands a salver with a lamp, a
coconut and other auspicious objects meandered towards the
temples in the dark evenings, while the drums throbbed against
their ears, mesmerising them so that their walk began to resemble
the glide of a somnambulist and their eyes began to glow, nest-
ing in the pupils the red flame of their lamps. After the orches-
tra ended, the oracle began his dance. He ran up and down,
through the crowd of people brandishing his scimitar before his
trance thickened and a tremor quickened his limbs. He leapt
and he roared. His voice changed into the guttural voice of an
angry Goddess. He whacked his own head with his scimitar.
Then the trustee spoke soothing words. The oracle’s son remo-
ved the scimitar from his father’s hands, and rubbed turmeric
into the wounds on his head. Kali was pacified for the time
being. The people heaved sighs of relief and returned home.

The oracle used to visit the houses of the wealthy on some
special days, escorted by the drummers and the trustee’s men.

KAMALA DAS

27

He danced in front of the elders, throwing on their bowed heads,
rice to bless them with prosperity and he warbled, I shall pro-
tect you and your descendants from eaemies and from disease,
is this not enough... and, the eldest woman of the house said,
that is enough, I am grateful, I am grateful....

While I grew as a child at the Nalapat House, I was trained
to decorate the porch with paddy and coconut-blossom for the
oracle's visit and to welcome him in the traditional way, lead-
ing him in with a lighted votary-lamp. I learned to light the
temple-lamps and the many oiled wicks which had to be placed
every evening at several spots around the house to honour the
Gods of directions. The ancient scriptures too thought of the
earth as a circular one. The North was presided over by Brah-
ma, the South by Ananta, the East by Indra and the West by
Varuna, the water-God. The North East was ruled by Siva, the
North West by Vayu and between the two lay Kubera’s king-
dom. The South East was ruled by Agni and the South West
by Ratri and somewhere between the two but above that of
Ananta, was the dusky empire of Yama, the God of death.

In the quieter months, mainly during the rains, came the
Ottanthullal dancer with his drummer and his cymbalist. He
bought his kit of traditional make-up, the green Manola for his
face, the powder to redden the eye and the collyrium. In his
bundle was the wide gilt-crown, the skirt of ribbons and the
imitation jewellery. The Nalapat House used to have those
performances several times a year. I used to sit close co the
dancer in the afternoon while he slowly and methodically pain-
ted up his face to resemble that of a supernatural being.

After the adults had had their siesta and their tea, the dance
began. The roll of the drum brought the school-children and
the poor to fill the courtyard. Friends and relatives sat on reed-
mats, chewing betel. The tales were picked up from the Maha-
bharata'; The one I liked best was Kalyana sougandhikam, which
narrated the exploits of Bhima who went in search of the legen-
dary flower that grew in a demon’s garden, only because his
wife Draupadi desired to adorn her hair with its petals. In day-
dreams I too became a Draupadi who commanded her adonng
mate to brave the demons to get flowers for her wavy tresses....

9

They would have liked him to go to bed
with a ghost every night

My grand-uncles’s mother, Madhavi Amma, was the
daughter of the well-known sorcerer of Malabar, the eldest
Namboodiripad of Kattumadam. She inherited from him a great
capacity for silence. She was like one of the swamps that form
themselves during the Malabar monsoons, with hard crusts
concealing the slush and its carnivorous hunger that draws in
with splashy sounds every living creature that comes its way. I
used to call her Valiamma, Big Mother, and ask her questions,
only out of a habit of asking questions, but she seldom gave
any answer.

Hers was a hard face, a shut safe of iron, that locked in all
the bitterness of her unhappy life, of which the others gave me
only sketchy details with some reluctance. It was not seemly
for the child of an orthodox family to ask questions of impor-
tance and the elders expressed their resentment. I learned that
Valiamma had been married to a handsome scholar who gave
her a son and soon afterwards fell out of favour with her uncle,
who threw him out one day asking him never to return.

The Nairs, particularly the males, were coarse when their ire
was aroused. The young Brahmin walked away not daring even
to glance back once at his wife and son. The young woman
was, within weeks, married off to her father’s nephew who was
not sensitive or gentle like the one who had gone away. For
days she waited at the fence under the lime trees hoping to see
her first husband pass that way but he did not.

KAMALA DAS

29

Valiamma never used to talk to her son. She was shy and
kept herself away from the men’s quarters. Except on his
birthday she did not even serve food to her son, and she seem-
ed ill at ease in his company. Perhaps she felt that she had
betrayed him by marrying for a second time, and one who was
so different from his father. Her son’s eyes pierced her heart
and unsettled all the vague feelings of guilt and bitterness. But
she need not have worried at all, for her son was a child of
light, easygoing and unruffled. There were no dark sewers
running beneath the streets of his mind.

He grew up learning English and Sanskrit, a spiritual child
to Varahamihira and Plato. The greatest of thinkers he regard-
ed as his parents. It was not important for him that he came
from the loins of a lesser being, an effeminate scholar who
charmed his mother with his rosy skin and sweet smile. He
built for himself a library with grilled walls and began to collect
books. He made friends with Vallathole who was at that time
the rising star of the Malayali literary firmament and together
they went around discussing their raw philosophy and captivat-
ing the listeners. He joined the Theosophical Movement.
Flamboyant people like the late Sardar K.M. Panikkar, James
Cousins and Miss Lightfoot, the Australian danseuse became
his friends. The Nalapat House hummed with intense and
intellectual talk. And, floating above the hum like a heavy-
winged bird was Vallathole’s full-throated laughter. Vallathole
had become deaf, and he did not know how to modulate his
voice. His sentences flowed, as he spoke, with the gush of
rivers blind to their destination, his happy voice, tremolo, at
times trembling in mid-air

My grand uncle’ became famous after he wrote the elegy that
was entitled Kannuneerthulli, the translation of which was
printed at a press in Great Britain. Its sales were not good.
Between Vallathole and my grand uncle tension began to grow,
and perhaps a touch of professional jealousy. Grand uncle was
jealous of the ease and felicity revealed in Vallathole’s writings,
and Vallathole was probably jealous of his friend’s capacity to
think in depth. My grand uncle’s first wife had died in child-

30

MY STORY

birth, shattering his happiness. It took him nearly fifteen years
to get over her death. When he married for a second time he
knew well that it was not like his first marriage, a love-match.
The Malayali readers who had wept copiously while reading his
famous elegy were dismayed to hear of his second marriage.
They would have liked him to go to bed with a ghost every
night. T remember a young lady called Sarada who was a
house-guest for two months telling my mother that she could
never never forgive Nalapat Narayana Menon for marrying
again.

When grand uncle’s mother died of cancer, he was lying ill
in a room a few yards away with large diabetic carbuncles all
over his body. He could not wear clothes at all. He lay covered
by a white sheet that showed blood-stains and the yellow of
some ointment. Once when my grand-aunt was washing him
I looked in and saw with horror the red hollow boils on his
chest. They looked like star-rubies. He was groaning with
pain when she swabbed the hollows with boric lotion. His
mother had complained of a stomachache and had asked for a
tablet of Aspirin although she had never in her life touched an
Allopathic drug. What is wrong, asked my grandmother,
growing anxious.

Valiamma was one who never showed to the world any-
thing as private as pain. She had lost a lot of weight and
looked pale in the face. Then there was some bleeding, and the
doctor told the others that it was probably cancer. He put her
on Morphine so that she lay peaceful while her scalp began to
emanate a sweet mouldy smell and white lice began to crawl
about in her hair. When she died after a fortnight and was
carried out, wrapped in linen, towards the southern yard my
grand uncle sat up on the bed and wept like a baby. It was
the first time that he was displaying his love for his mother.
After a few minutes when the pyre was lit by other hands he
collapsed once again on the bed.

Valiamma had not stepped out of the Nalapat House for
over thirty years except to go to the privy that was a furlong

KAMALA DAS

31

away and to the pond for her baths. I cried too when I saw
her frail body being removed. She had had long wavy hair
touching her calves, incredibly soft, silken and touched with
grey. Her poor poor hair, I whispered, while the flames grew
large and devoured her. My father took me back to Calcutta
on the next day, feeling that I had had enough of illnesses and
deaths and required a change.

She was half-crazed with love and hardly

noticed me

My brother and I, with the help and co-operation of our
friends began a theatre movement, calling our group the Van-
nery Children’s Dramatic Society, and staged each of our pro-
ductions on the multi-levelled patio of the Nalapat House, hir-
ing gaudy curtains, costumes and the stage-hands from the
nearest town.

The prominent citizens sat in the first three rows. Behind
them on the hired school benches sat our relatives, and in the
courtyard, on the sand rested the pittites who clapped their
hands and roared in enthusiasm when emotions touched their
highest peaks. The village had no electricity in those days.
The footlights were hurricane lamps, covered according to
changing moods, with coloured cellophane.

The first play we staged was a Malayalam adaptation of a
chapter from Victor Hugo’s classic Les Miserables, the one that
described Jean Valjean’s visit to the house of Tennardierre to
meet the little orphan Cossette. I was Eponyne, the haughty
daughter of the Tennardierres. When I first entered the stage
and saw the footlights glimmer palely like the stars of a wintry
morning and the upturned faces, I shed all wraps of shyness and
began to sing in a clear, cool voice.

Our team succeeded in wringing out tears from the stony
hearts of the chieftains who sat in the front row. The pittites
sobbed their hearts out when Jean Valjean brought an expensive
doll for the orphan. They cried out of joy. After that the

KAMALA DAS

33

applause and the magic of the footlights haunted us. We had to
go on acting to hear more and more of the applause.

My best performance was in the role of the Moghul queen
Nurjehan and my best scene the one in which she was shown
visiting the battleground after the gory war was over. A card-
board elephant was stuck to a stool on which I sat with my
right leg thrown over the cutout. My crown of board and tinsel
was heavy and the posture was uncomfortable. But there was
such a silence in the auditorium that it seemed to us then that
they had forgotten the fact that a kidlet was playing the queen’s
role. I felt intoxicated with the warmth of their response. My
brother later congratulated himself for having insisted on giving
the role to me against the wishes of other members who had
felt that a prettier girl would be more suitable. The prettier
one got the part of Mumtaz Mahal, the wife of Prince Khurram,
and she did display creditable prettiness.

In a year’s time we had staged the Malayalam translations
of all Dvijendralal Roy-plays and had got on to Kalidas’s
Sakuntalam and Bhasha’s Swapnavasavadattam. My brother
as Rana Pratap was a hammy treat. He trod the boards like a
seasoned thespian, wearing crowns and glittering achkans with
swords tucked into his sash and spoke emphatically of dying for
his land. Every drop of my blood I shall spill to protect you,
oh my dear country, he roared, and the footlights cast a wild
red glow over the sequins of his dress. A lunate aura circled
his brow. From the green room’s chaos, the make-up men beat
the drums, softly, moodily, to warn the audience of impending
death....

My grandmother was worried about the duskiness of my
skin and rubbed raw turmeric on Tuesdays and Fridays all
over my body before the oilbath. She oiled my hair and washed
it carefully with a viscid shampoo made out of the tender lea-
ves of the hibiscus. It was fashionable then to have curly hair
and naturally she took pride in showing it off to our relatives
who praised my thick tresses but mumbled unkind things about
my colour. TI remember going to our cook in the afternoon and
asking him secretly if I were really ugly. He had laughed loud

34

MY STORY

exclaiming “No, no, not at all. In fact I feel that you may
become, in ten years’ time, a real beauty”.

When I was nine, my father, coming home on leave, found
me to have become too rustic for his liking and immediately
admitted me into a boarding school run by the Roman Catho-
lic nuns. I went with him in a taxi, carrying with me a long
black box shaped like a child’s coffin in which my grandmother
had packed my meagre belongings: four white frocks made of
mill-khaddar, four old-fashioned knickers and two towels. My
grandmother did not know at that time of the function of a
petticoat or a chemise. I was ignorant too of city-fashions.

My father introduced me first to the Mother Superior who
wore round her waist not only a rosary with a silver cross but a
tiny pair of scissors which was perhaps to snip off little hairs
that might grow on her scalp. All the nuns had, under their
black veils, clean-shaven scalps that shone pink in the dim lights
of their dormitories while they undressed for the night.

When my father introduced me to the Boarding sister, Sister
Philomene, she embraced me with her plump arms and whisper-
ed, don’t worry my dear, I am here to look after you.. ..She was
about fifty and had on her pale chin two scraggly hairs. Her
round face was serene and her smile tender. Tears came to my
eyes out of gratitude. When my father got into the car and
vanished round the corner I followed Sister Philomene to the
Boarding house which was half a furlong away.

A twelve-year-old girl in a striped frock was standing beside
the gate looking out. Come, Raji, called out Sister Philomene,
meet another newcomer, Kamala.... Raji looked as if she had
cried a lot. Her eyes were red and held only misery and mis-
trust. But she accompanied us to the Boarding. It was a circu-
lar structure, two-storeyed, with a garden where instead of
flowers grew only tapioca and a veil at the back shaded by a
gauva tree.

The garden gate which was kept locked always, faced the
road and a hotel which sold among other things ice-cream
which the girls bought, stealthily climbing over the wall in the
dark. Sister Philomene had another nun to assist her in her

KAMALA DAS

35

duties. This was an unpleasant person who thought it her mis-
sion in life to catch the children guilty of sins both of omission
and of commission and to take them to the Mother Superior
for appropriate punishment. Her mouth watered and her cur-
rant-like eyes glistened when anyone was found dozing during
the study-hour or talking to her neighbour. The children hated
her.

When I first walked in, the Anglo-Indian girls seated in the
hall stopped their sewing and began to sing: “She had nothing
under when she came”, and I wondered why they laughed look-
ing at me. Then an older girl got up and came towards me. I
am Sarada Menon, she said, I am going to be your room-
mate.

She took me to the northern room on the ground floor
which had an adjacent dressing-room and a jasmine-vine grow-
ing beside the window. I was given the widest bed, the one
beside the window. There were four beds in the room. Raji
was to occupy the one next to mine. Besides the three of us,
there was a thin fourteen-year-old called Meenakshi who looked
like an El Greco painting. Sarada was the prettiest and being
the oldest became our guardian willingly. She shared with us
the sweets that she had brought from home. Raji refused to
eat anything. What is the use being homesick, asked Sarada.
We have to stick it out here until the December vacation.

Sarada was one who had grown up in Singapore. She had
stylishly cut dresses which reached only to her knees revealing
the slight bandiness of her calves, which only made the legs
more arresting. She was reserved, talking only to her teachers
and to her room-mates. A second-class boarder from Goa fell
in love with her and kept pestering her with tender notes and
tenderer glances until Sarada lost her temper and shouted at her.

The lesbian admirer came into our room once when Sarada
was away taking a bath and kissed her pillowcase and her un-
dies hanging out to dry in the dressing room. I lay on my bed
watching this performance but she was half-crazed with love,
and hardly noticed me.

The girls in boarding school came from a
very different background

My room-mate Raji was the only daughter of a wealthy me-
dical practitioner and a pampered child. It was for some les-
sons in discipline that she was sent by her parents to the board-
ing school. But she believed in teaching the nuns a lesson
and somehow punishing them for ‘their holier than thou’ atti-
tude.

The assistant boarding mistress scolded Raji whenever an
opportunity presented itself, which was as often as twice a day.
Raji sulked nearly all the time and opened her mouth only to
mutter profanities about the stern nun. I wish she dies, said
Raji one day, before she took up her Bible for the nightly pra-
yer.

My room mates nicknamed me Ulba and began to pamper
me with little gifts of sweets and ice-cream. They wanted me to
get for myself better clothes and forced me to write to my
father in Calcutta asking for a silk frock for my tenth birthday.

They did not know how it hurt my pride to do such a thing.
1 knew well that I would fall in my father’s esteem by revealing
desire for fancy clothes. They came from a background very
different from mine. They thought it normal for children to
wear good clothes and tie satin ribbons in their hair. They
wanted to see me look as pretty as their sisters and cousins who
were of my age.

My grandmother used to send someone or other once in two

KAMALA DAS

37

months to bring me to Nalapat for a week-end. When after one
of those short stays I left home, my escort was my grand unc-
le’s youngest brother-in-law. My grandmother wanted him to
get for me from the city-bazaar some cloth for the frock which
I was to wear for my birthday.

My grandmother could hardly afford to buy me silks. The
sum she gave him must have been meagre, for the uncle told
the shop’s salesman that he wished to be shown some inexpen-
sive cloth, something coloured but not too fancy. The salesman
pulled down on the counter, bales and bales of beautiful poplins
with prints of flowers and animals.

Xs there nothing cheaper, asked my uncle in a loud, carrying
voice and the people walking along the road, slowed down to
see what was going on. I want for this child something really
cheap, shouted the uncle. I felt humiliated. I wanted like Sita
to disappear into the bowels of the earth. Finally some printed
mill-khaddar was brought out which suited our pockets. A blue
on white design which cost us two and a half rupees.

When it was shown to my room-mates they hated its coarse-
ness. Poor little Ulba, they said. But I comforted them by
telling them that the frock from Calcutta would anyway be rea-
ching me before the birthday. On the eve of my birthday
they took me out for shopping, saying that Sarada needed to
get some gift for her cousin Satyavati.

Then to my utter amazement I saw the loveliest fabrics laid
out on the counters, and my eyes took in with a wild greed the
flamboyance of the colours and the gleam of the midday sun on
the silks and taflfettas.

If you were Satyavati which would you choose for a dress,
asked Sarada. After a long pause during which I touched the
softness and the cool of the silks, I spoke ; this one in heliotrope
of course. It had clusters of small white flowers. Sarada bought
it, and, then exhausted by the day’s rounds, we returned to the
school. When I woke up on my tenth birthday my room-mates
sang the Happy Birthday song to me and presented me with the
beautiful cloth I had chosen for Satyavati, Then the tears came.

38

MY STORY

and I went hiding my face in Sarada’s hair. You will look so
pretty in this violet-coloured frock, said Meenakshi.

The Mother Superior had sent for me, and the message frigh-
tened me, because 1 had arranged for some ice-cream to be
smuggled into the school over the wall that evening. But when
I went up to her room, she only handed me a packet of embroi-
dered hand-kerchiefs and wished me many happy returns of the
day.

The Calcutta-frock arrived a mouth late and as it was chosen
by my busy father’s secretary it turned out to be terribly over-
sized. I put it away in my back box under the towels and the
bed-sheets.

The assistant boarding-mistress was harsh with Raji when
she fell ill. She accused Raji of malingering and plotting to ev-
ade the first term’s tests. Raji was so upset by the lecture that
she cried and began to vomit on to the floor. I was in tears
too. I was extremely fond of Raji who was disdainful towards
all but very kind to me, and I felt afraid that she was going to
die. She had looked yellow and wan for a week. She had
taken no food at all for several hours. I had coaxed her to
drink some buttermilk but even that she had thrown up.

Don’t worry, Ulba, said Raji, I am going to be well as soon
as I get out of this purgatory. That evening Raji’s parents came
to take her away. Her father diagnosed the illness as Jaundice.
I helped her pack her things. Won’t you return when you get cur-
ed, I kept asking her. No I will not return to this place, said
Raji. But I have written down on the walls of the lavatories
some messages for the nuns. After I leave, please go and read
them. But do not tell anyone that I wrote the stuff....

After Raji had left, I suddenly became lonely. She was the
only one who liked to whisper in bed at night after the ten o’
clock’s silence-bell had struck. Both Sarada and Meenakshi were
obsessed with their study. They thought it a waste of time
chatting about the vagaries of the nuns. Raji had once dragged
me to a windowsill at night and had helped me climb the ledge
to peep into the nuns’ dormitories. She fotmd the sight of their
bald heads very amusing. We used to giggle endlessly whenever
that particular memory came up.

KAMALA DAS

39

I read the message Raji had scribbled with charcoal on the
privy walls. It said that the assistant boarding-mistress was an
ape and that instead of brains her head contained only some
dung and dog- shit. Raji also wrote that all the nuns were finally
to meet with a gory end, for they could not, however much
they tried, hood wink the all-seeing God

12

Homely Annie gets handsome young lover !

On holidays there were three study sessions for the boarders.
One hour in the naorning, two hours in the afternoon and one
hour between seven and eight in the evening after supper. All
that was expected of the students was total silence.

The nun in charge of the session sat sewing but slyly watch-
ed the girls who dared to raise their eyes from the books to look
at one another. On fortunate days we had the mild Sister
Theda who never bothered about what was going on, but read
her book or mended old veils, without once looking up from
her work.

The girl who sat near me one day at study was fifteen and
was called Annie. She kept reading and re-reading a letter and
when she saw me glance at her, she whispered that she wanted
me to read the letter that she had received from a boy. A rich
and handsome boy, who was very fair and tall. He is always
pestering me with such letters, Annie said, frowning.

I read with amazement that the boy considered Annie the
most beautiful girl in the world and that he wanted not only to
hold her in his arms, but also to kiss her passionately on her
full lips. Do not be so cruel to me, sweet Annie, the lover had
written, give me a chance to prove my love for you.... What do
you think of this, asked Annie. Isn’t he audacious ? I nodded.

I studied Annie’s face with a new interest. She looked very
plain to me. She was thin and her skin was swarthy and blotch-
ed with acne. Her teeth were in bad shape. Her hair was oily

KAMALA DAS

41

and hung in two scraggy plaits. This was the girl whom the
rich boy adored so blindly. I felt sorry for the boy. But all
I said was that she ought to try hard and love him back in
return. Do you believe in love, asked Annie and without let-
ting me reply, she shrugged her shoulders and said with a smile,
after all you are only a little child, how can you be expected to
know what love means....

When I told Sarada about Annie’s lover she grew angry.
You must not talk to that horrible creature again, she said.
During study, sit close to me or near Meenakshi. Don’t mix
with riff-raff. But Annie did not leave me alone even for a
day. She used to call me to the bath-house in the afternoon on
Sundays only to lean against the wall and talk to me about her
lover. She showed me yet another letter in which he had pro-
gressed in his ardour to such an extent, that he wrote about the
round smooth breasts of Annie which he was dying to touch.
I was shocked. Didn’t I tell you, asked Annie, didn’t I tell you
he was a worthless lecher ? He does not love me. He only
wants my body....

And, I glanced at Annie’s breasts which were flat and un-
appetising. Ask him not to write again, I said. Tell him that
you will report him to the Mother Superior.

One day Annie called me aside and showed me a bruise on
her upper lip. He bit me, she said, and bewildered, I asked,
who bit you ? That one, the rich boy who loves me, said Annie
in a whisper; he climbed over the wall and came to my bed last
night when all of you were asleep. This is awful, I said, you
must report to the Mother Superior at once. One day he will
kill you. Annie gave an enigmatic smile. You are too young
to know what love means, she said, but you are the only one
I can trust with a secret....

During the third term, Annie was expelled from the board-
ing school and the nuns gave out no valid reasons. She left
early in the morning before any of us had woken up, carrying
with her all her books and clothes. An uncle had come in the
night to take Annie away.

42

MY STORY

Later, Sarada told me that she was living in a world of
make-believe and that all the loveletters were found to be in her
own handwriting. Meenakshi laughed, but I felt some kind of
loyalty towards Annie and kept silent. Good riddance, said
Sarada, combing her long hair, she was a bad influence on our
little Ulba,

There were Ihree kinds of boarders in the convent. The first
class boarders, who were given a breakfast of cereal, eggs and
toast, meat at lunch-time, snacks at tea and pudding after
supper; the second class girls, who had only cereal at breakfast,
rice and fish curry at lunch and no pudding at supper ; the
third class boarders, who got only a gruel made of maize in the
morning, rice at lunch and gruel again at night. Worse ojBf than
even the third class boarder were the orphans who cleaned the
lavatories, swept the droppings of the turkeys and the dead
leaves from the kitchen yard, chopped firewood, helped in the
kitchen and ate only two meals of gruel a day.

They wore white and exuded the smell of rancid coconut oil
which they had applied to their dusty hair. The orphans were
nearly all the time busy filling up the wooden tubs in the many
bathrooms meant for the boarders and the nuns. This tired
them out so much that they hated drawing water from the well
for their own baths. They therefore bathed only once a week.

The oldest orphan was a 70-year-old lady called Rocky
Mariam who went to the bazaar with baskets to buy the provi-
sions for the cuisine-house. Whenever she came on the scene
the turkeys chased her, making loud friendly sounds, and she
spoke to them in Malayalam in a quavering voice full of ajffec-
tion. They are calling me Ammachi (Mother) said the old lady
one day, pointing to the gawky birds. The cook laughed, and
her laughter resembled the cackle of birds. She was called
Felicitas and was respected by all the orphans. It was within
her power to give them an extra ladle of gruel if they pleased
her. She was weedy and emaciated. Her teeth looked like rusty
nails, being pointed, and discoloured by the betel and tobacco
she chewed the whole day long.

After each vacation each of us brought from our homes

KAMALA DAS

43

sweets and fruits and banana-chips. Once my grandmother had
sent with me a bunch of ripe yellow bananas which disappeared
from our dressing room at night. It was obvious that someone
very hungry had eaten them, creeping into our room while we
were asleep, for we found the peels lying outside the window.

I did not want anyone to know of this petty theft but the
assistant boarding-mistress somehow got wind of it and decided
to make a huge fuss. After the prayer she told the children
that St. Anthony was going to turn the culprit insane within
three days. For two days we went around looking for signs of
lunacy in others’ faces.

Finally, at dusk, a terrified girl went up to the plaster statue
of St. Anthony in the chapel and began to sob hysterically. The
nuns prayed to the saint and begged him to spare the young
girl in view of her tender age. She was a plump girl, fond of
eating and apparently the convent’s niggardly rations did not
satisfy her hunger. She was let off with a gloomy warning
from the Mother Superior. She developed convulsions soon
after and went home for good.

] The obsession with sin destroyed the minds of several girls
who were at the beginning of their adolescence, normal and
easygoing. If there was a dearth of sin, sin at any cost had to
be manufactured, because forgiving the sinners was a therapeu-
tic exercise, popular with the rabidly virtuous.

13

The nuns used to censor
the letters we wrote

When I fell ill at the boarding and later developed a rash,
the nuns decided to send me home. They chose a middle-
aged spinster named Ponnamma to be my escort. Sarada pow-
dered my face, trying to conceal the pink spots, and tied up my
hair in a pony-tail with a broad yellow ribbon. Ponnamma
took me by bus, and all through the journey she kept explain-
ing to the other passengers that the rash was not measles but
only a mild allergy that I picked up after eating shell-fish. The
bus-conductor was friendly towards us and kept calling Ponnam-
ma “sister” although he was meeting her for the first time.

When I reached Nalapat my grandmother rose in surprise
to greet me. It is only measles, said Ponnamma. Your brother
is already here, said my grandmother, he has measles too, he
arrived from his hostel yesterday. She took me up to the middle
room where my brother Mohandas was lying in bed reading
H.G. Wells. His face seemed mottled with the red rash. You
have come too, he said giving me a smile. It was the usual
thing for us to fall ill at the same time. As children in Calcutta,
fever attacked us only simultaneously so that. we enjoyed the
spell of rest, painting pictures together, seated on our sick bed
and sticking stamps in our albums. If ever I had a personal
hero in my childhood it was my brother, who came out first in
every class and in every school he went to, and bagged all the
prizes. He could draw fine caricatures of the national leaders
and write humourous articles. Whenever he made a speech his

KAMAiA DAS

45

voice could, with its fine modulations, control his audience, and
swing them into his way of thought. He would have made an
excellent politician, but he turned to medicine and later became
a successful surgeon....

I used to tell my brother that I would take up law. I had
heard that lawyers made enormous amounts of money and lived
in style, keeping more than three cars and a pack of servants.
I loved opulence and luxury. Perhaps this was the reason for
my choosing the roles of queens and princesses whenever we
decided to stage a play. I liked the bewitchment of gems, silks
and perfumes. In all my day-dreams. I saw myself as a be-
jewelled empress who controlled the destinies of her country-
men. Some kind of a Noor Jehan. I hated to see myself as I
really was, in mirrors which threw back at me the pathetic con-
tours of my thin body and the plain face with the protruding
teeth.

When we were separated, my brother and I, I felt alone and
lost, for between us even in the silence we shared was a pure
kind of communication, an interminable dialogue that went on
and on like that of the wind with the earth or of the sun with
the trees. Each drew sustenance from the other’s unspoken
support. I wrote two letters to my brother but they were stilted
and dull and he did not care to reply. The nuns used to censor
the letters we wrote before they were sent for mailing. They
compelled us to write that we were very happy at the boarding
and that every day we prayed to God for the well-being of our
relatives. My brother must have thought that I had lost my
mind, reading my idiotic letters. He must have wondered what
had happened to my social conscience, my political sense and
my curiosity.

In the beginning when I was miserable I had with the help of
a day-scholar posted an appeal to my father begging him to res-
cue me from what I considered to be hell. I hated the meaty
smell of the vegetable-curry and the viscid soups. I hated the
cold water baths which gave me frequent cramps and a persis-
tent ache in my calves. My father did not reply to that weepy
letter. By the time the year was out I had begun to like my
room-mates, and the boarding ceased to resemble hell.

46

MY STORY

Then my father took me back to Calcutta to live with the
family. Our family had increased to six by then. I had a
younger brother and a baby-sister. We lived in an old yellow
house at Lansdowne Road which had large bedrooms with high
ceilings and a verandah shaded by curtains made of khus. There
was a narrow garden separating the house from the pavement
where we grew cactus and crotons. At the back was the kitchen-
house, consisting of a large dark kitchen, a coal-shed and an
attic-room where the cook and his wife, our ayah, slept at night.
The servant’s privy was some yards away, in the North-West
corner. It was said to be haunted by the ghost of a pregnant
girl who had committed suicide hanging herself from its ceiling.
At night the servants were afraid to go there.

The old Chaprassi who slept in the coal-shed urinated in the
corner of his den and we could smell it from the kitchen. He
drank arrack every evening and smoked beedis sitting on his
charpoy in the dark. There was a naked bulb hanging on a wire
in his room but he hated to switch it on. I don’t like to waste
your father’s money, he told me one day. When I was starving
in far-away Kunnamkulam your father saved me from penury
and brought me here. Now I send home enough money to
educate my boy and to keep my girls well-clothed. Your father
is a king.

Next to God, I revere him most in this world. Do you
understand ? And, sitting near him on his charpoy, I nodded.
He was well over sixty and looked worn-out. But he worked
during the day at my father's o.ffice, preparing frothy tea for the
clerks. In the evenings he was our Chaprassi and opened the
door to our visitors with a greeting in English and a cultured
grin. He had worked for our relatives, Mr. and Mrs. K. N.
Menon, the parents of Aubrey Menon, for a year and had
learned how to please the Westernised Indians.

One day he got from his son a letter stating that his old
wife was dying. The old man wrung out his large nose and
told my mother that he wanted to send a hundred rupees im-
mediately to meet the expenses of the funeral. Money was dis-
patched by telegraphic money order in an hour’s time. The

KAMALA DAS

47

would-be-widower sat on his charpoy talking about his wife in
the past tense, recounting her vanished beauty and her kind-
liness.

After a week the wife recovered from the ailment and wrote
a letter to thank him for the money. He was in a rage. That
good-for-nothing hag, he shouted, when he had the letter read
out to him, she cheated me of a neat hundred ! If she decides
to die after a few months how will I be able to raise another
hundred for the funeral ? He went out and drank a lot of arrack
that evening to calm himself down. Why didn’t she die at the
proper time, he asked me, and when I smiled at him he nodded
his head and muttered, it is God’s will....

“I wanted to marry a rich man
. . .to be a snob’"

From the rectangular balcony of our house we could see
across the road and into the garden of the wealthy lady who had
once figured in the famous Bhowal Sanyasi case. Her playboy
of a husband had died at a hill station when he was very young.

But one day after several years a sanyasi went up to the
family and declared that he was none other than the one who
was supposed to have died.

The pall-bearers had left him on the lit pyre and run away
to escape from a sudden downpour that ultimately put out the
fire and brought him back to consciousness. He was taken
away by a sanyasi to an ashram and nursed back to health. He
too became one of the sect but later, much later, he decided to
come back to Calcutta to claim his share of the family’s pro-
perty. His wife refused to acknowledge him as her lost husband.
She did not see any similarity in the features of the corpulent
sanyasi and called him a mere impostor. The sanyasi filed a
suit and waited patiently for the court’s verdict but before he
could benefit from its favourable judgment he fell ill and died.

The widow, wearing plain white, flitted about like an aging
Snow White in the garden where roses of several colours grew.
There was a rookery, a pond with a wide ledge where she sat in
the evenings watching the water and a little gnarled tree bearing
yellow flowers. The birds were always very noisy in her garden
but she seldom spoke to anyone or ever went out of the house.

KAMALA DAS

49

Her brother stayed with her. He used to walk with long strides
in the garden, and he too seemed silent, thoughtful. It was as
if the two of them knew that their minds were bruised with
doubts which could never be swept away.

To the left of our house lived a family that entertained
lavishly and hobnobbed with the international bigwigs. They
believed strongly in Moral Rearmament. Members of the
movement visiting India invariably came to Calcutta and stayed
for a while with them. The lady of the house sat in the morn-
ings near the dining table, fat and contented, checking the
kitchen accounts with her cook and cutting up the vegetables
for the salads. Her youngest son came to our house in the
evenings to play shuttle-cock with us in the space between our
dining hall and the kitchen-house.

He was obese and left-handed. He used to bore us with
details of the many matches he had won at his school. He
showed us as evidence a letter he was going to post to the
Tollygunge Club inviting the players over for a tournament. He
became a member of the Casma Players Badminton Club which
my brother and I had started along with four of our friends.
He pestered us to make him our captain, but we decided to
wait until the Tollygunge players replied to his letter before
honouring him. They did not reply to his letter.

He was always in need of money. Have you got four annas
to lend me, he would ask, nosediving down from the corrugated
roof of our kitchen adjoining theirs, I need it urgently. ..My
mother had an old tin where she stored buttons for my father's
shirts and buckles. I would rummage among the buttons and
find for my friend a few coins. The urgent need was nearly
always an ice-cream. T^e ice-cream vendors used to cycle along
the roads carrying their yellow boxes and shouting musically.
Ice-cream Magnolia, Ice-cream Magnolia.

To the right of our house in an old ramshackle mansion,
showing only its profile to the street, lived the Zamindars of
Madhupore who had a daughter of my age named Shantu. She
had a mole on her cheek of which she spoke with great pride.
It is a beauty spot, she said. Only one in million will get born
with a beauty spot on the cheek... I was sick with envy. I had

50

MY STORY

by tben begun to wear glasses to correct myopia. I would
rather die than wear glasses, said Shantu. She used to come
every evening to my house to take lessons in Manipuri dance
from my teacher, Sjt. Brajabashi.

One day, while my parents were out, she took me to her
house where in the dim lit halls and corridors I saw with fasci-
nated eyes statuettes of jade and amber, rust-brown carpets
woven in Persia and gossamer drapes of yellowing lace. We
went up the staircase and entered a darker domain, a bedroom,
where on a fourposter an old man lay huddled beneath silk
quilts. His face was narrow like a mountain goat’s. Dadoo,
this is my friend, Kamala, said Shantu. The old man who was
her grandfather lifted his head and chortled. His vacant eyes
and the laughing mouth frightened me. I was soaked in
perspiration when I finally got away from his presence.

But afterwards, standing on my terrace, reaching out to
touch the ripe jamun sprinkling the treetop with ivory, I prayed
to God to make me rich enough to live in an old mansion full
of statuettes and silver and old lace.

I wanted to marry a rich man, a zamindar, and live on in
the city of Calcutta. Above all I wished to be a snob.

15

We were subjected to subtle sadism
of several kinds

My father had admitted me to a school near our house which
had at one time a college attached to it. A revolutionary student
had made an unsuccessful attempt to shoot dead the British
Governor, and this closed down the college.

Its vast rooms were converted into bedrooms for the teachers
and into libraries. Those of the Calcutta elite who had been
unwittingly drawn into the grip of Gandhism sent their children
to that school instead of admitting them into the anglicized
Loretto House.

Our principal was an old spinster who formed strong likes
and dislikes on the basis of physical allure and the lack of it.
She used to whisper often to a classmate of mine that she ought
not to read late into the night and ruin her health and beauty.
Nearly all the teachers were old maids, turned sour with rejec-
tion, and so we were subjected to subtle sadism of several
kinds.

I had at that time only one reliable friend, a stout girl named
Romola, who was prepared to like even the most snobbish and
the most malevolent. Clowning came easy to her and the naivete
of her reactions to any situation was moving. Not one girl hated
her, although all made fun of her.

The most snobbish were the West Bengali rich who spoke a
faster dialect and kept themselves aloof. They talked endlessly
of Sarat Babu’s novels and hummed tunes from Rabindra San-

52

MY STORY

geet. They had their lunches brought to the school by their
servants in tiffin carriers of gleaming brass, which when spread
out on the class desks, revealed fish in a red gluey gravy, rice,
fried prawns and sweets made from cream.

If any of us who belonged to the group of dry-lunchers
walked past the rooms while their lunch was going on, they
stopped their munching and tried to hide their plates. They
believed genuinely that we were envious of them and that we
were capable of making them fall ill, merely by glancing at their
food with our greedy eyes. Their discomfiture amused us a
great deal because their food always looked to us sticky and
unclean. Our cheese sandwiches, in comparison seemed clean
and wholesome.

Then there were the orthodox Tamils who preferred to hide
behind the staircases and the bathrooms to eat the curds and
rice which they had brought from their homes, a sticky mixture
sprinkled with green chillies and lime, lovingly prepared by their
mothers or widowed grandmothers. This was always brought
in round containers dented and tarnished with age. The Tamils
had an inferiority complex which rose basically from this meagre
diet. They kept themselves away from the others, and whisper-
ed to one another of M. L. Vasanta Kumari and M. S. Subba-
lakshmi. The Bengalis made faces at them and muttered ‘‘antra
puntra antra puntra.”

Our Maths teacher was a young woman with a perpetual
scowl who wore a circular brooch at her waist to accentuate
its slenderness. My benchmate Mamata fell in love with
her and gazed at her with adoration while she took our
class. Isn’t she the prettiest person you have seen, Mamata
used to ask me repeatedly. Mamata was weak in Maths and
was often punished for not trying to learn its rudiments. At
such moments she wore on her face a beatific expression as
though she had become a saint or at least a Joan of Arc. When
the teacher left Calcutta in search of a better job, Mamata grew
listless and stopped coming to school.

Our English teacher was an Austrian refugee who had escap-
ed from Nazi Germany, She was stout and redfaced. She

KAMALA DAS

53

had the typical kinky hair of the Jews. She spoke English with
a thick German accent, pronouncing stop as sthop. The girls
used to giggle in her class and try to spatter ink on the four
good dresses that she possessed. One day she caught a girl
shaking her pen at her and was very upset. I am not rich like
some of you, she said. I don’t have many sets of clothes or the
money to buy such things. Her eyes filied with tears while she
said this. The guilty girl bowed her head in shame.

I had joined the school in the second term and so my father
decided to let me have enough tutors to help me at home. One
of them was a Syrian Christian spinster who was short and
aggressive. A female Napoleon. I was terrified of her. One
evening she stood at the window watching from behind the cur-
tain a ball that was going on in our neighbour’s house. Bejewel-
led women and men in black waltzed to slow music. There were
potted palms near the pillars that had been borrowed from our
garden in the afternoon. The scent of the cut flowers and the
perfumes used by the ladies travelled to us, borne by the wind.
I was quite fascinated.

Then I saw a dark man walking in, wearing not a suit but a
bush shirt and he looked around with self-assurance and a
smile. My teacher’s hand on the curtain went tense all of a
sudden. Don’t look at him, the one in the bush shirt, she whis-
pered, he is the most wicked man alive, I knew him well once
upon a time... Her face had grown pale and she was panting
with hate. How I hate him, she said.

I stared at the man who had caused such a storm in the
mind of my teacher. He had an animal grace. He danced with
light steps as though his shoes had in its soles, coiled springs.
I like his looks, I told my teacher. She pulled me away in
a hurry. You are not to look at that man. He has ruined the
lives of several good girls. He has disgraced some of the best
families in India, she said. How did he ruin the lives of the
girls, I asked her. She was too distressed to reply.

After that incident, I thought often about the man. He was
dark and of small build. Except for a leonine grace, he had
nothing to attract the passing eye. The adjective “wicked”

54

MY STORY

compensated for his deficiencies. It was the first time that I had
seen somebody who was notorious. I felt that I ought to meet
him when I grew up, and perhaps become his mistress. All the
wisdom of early adolescence told me that it would not do to
marry a wicked man. Being a mistress to him meant pain in a
bearably moderate dose and plenty of chances to forgive the
sweet sinner.

16

I prayed to the Sun God to give me a

male child

After my maidservant married the cook and started to
share his room above the kitchen, I used to sleep alone in the
large bedroom facing the verandah. The house was old, with
high ceilings, and fans hanging on long iron rods that squeaked
while they moved.

I used to fear the dark and all the creatures nesting in it,
like ghosts and malevolent spirits. Each night I went to bed
with the light burning on, pretending to have read myself to
sleep. But at about two or three in the morning I would wake
to find the light switched off. My parents probably got up at
night to switch off my light.

I used to lie awake hearing thin swishing sounds which
sounded like the sighs of spooks. Next to my room was a
hall where the previous tenant, who had only sublet the house
to us, had stored all his things, a divan with heavy mattresses,
cupboards locked and unlocked, hat stands, dressers and huge
wooden chests which his father, a Captain in the Navy, had
once brought from China.

I used to think that the old Captain’s ghost was peeping from
the low wall that separated my room from his hall. I thought
of him as an old, bearded man, wearing a pirate’s hat. In the
day his room was not very frightening. My father had asked us
never to go into the room or look into his almirahs, but when
he was out, I’d open the shelves and take stock of the dead
one’s belongings.

56

MY STORY

We had at the back of the house, a spiral staircase which
was used only by the servants and the boys belonging to our
badminton club who liked to spiral upwards fast to churn up
their insides. Once I tried it but stopped midway feeling that I
was about to faint. I was rescued in time by my maidservant,
who carried me up to the prayer room where my mother was
lighting the brass lamps in front of Krishna.

My frock had large spots of blood on it. I felt the hot blood
flowing onto my thighs and dripping down to the floor. I am
ill. I am dying, I cried to my mother. Something has broken
inside me and I am bleeding. My mother lifted my dress and
said with a laugh, it is nothing to be worried about, it is what
all girls get at twelve or thirteen... She asked me to change my
dress and taught me to wear sanitary pads. She told me that
the blood only showed that I was ready to be a mother.

The maidservant kept laughing as she watched me change
my dress. What a simpleton this child is, she said. After three
days of dampness, I was as good as new again. I felt happy to
think that I too could be a mother. I wanted to get a child for
myself as fast as I could. I had heard from my grandmother
the story of Kunthi, the mother of Pandavas and had been im-
pressed with her methods of getting good sons.

Kunthi had prayed to the Sun God to grant her a son and
thus Kama, the beauteous one, was born, wearing on his ear-
lobes kundals that shone like the sun. After bath, alone in my
room, I bared my body to the sun and told the Sun God that he
ought to give me a son too. Take all of me, I cried, take my
swelling limbs, take my wavy tresses, take my round breasts
with their diminutive nipples, take all of me and give me a
son. No God came forward to claim me as his woman. But
gradually I grew. One or two places sprouted hair. The
smell of my perspiration changed. My father sent away the
dancing master, saying that I was too old to dance.

At Chowringhee, there was a well-known dentist who had
returned from Vienna with the latest knowledge in Orthodontia.
He straightened my teeth with braces and told me at the last
sitting, now you are a very pretty little girl. Nobody in our
family ever liked to pay one another such compliments. So

KAMALA DAS

57

when I heard the words, I blushed purple with happiness. From
that day I began to pay more attention to my toilet. I brushed
my hair regularly before going to bed and washed my face three
times a day. If ever I discovered a pimple on my cheek, I tinted
it pink with lipstick to make it a pretty pimple. I removed my
glasses at the slightest provocation to expose my eyes which I
thought were rather lovely.

All the heroines of Bengali novels were supposed to bear in
their eyes a sadness which made them irresistible to their heroes.
I too tried to look sad, but it was a difficult task, for there were
so many things that made me burst into laughter, and the world
seemed so young, so happy so full of promise !

At thirteen when I went home to Malabar for my summer
vacation, I fell in love with a student-leader who had been jailed
for his revolutionary activities. He did not reciprocate, for his
only interest was politics. He had read the writing of all the
famous political philosophers and could quote effortlessly from
their books. He had eyes that rolled upwards showing only
their whites whenever he grew excited. My grandaunt told me
that he had serpent-eyes and that people with such eyes were
never to be trusted. She must have deduced from my behavi-
our that I had become infatuated with his charm. I tried to
spend as much time as I could get in his company, but he did
not once touch my hand or show any particular fondness for
me.

My grandmother had got a local tailor named Kumaran to
make for me two long skirts of green and two pale pink blouses.

I had no jewellery at all. I thought that it was my austere
way of dressing that ruined my first love and made it unre-
quited. Then I tried to wear flowers in my hair. But all he
said was that I should, without wasting any more time, begin
to read Marx and Engels.

17

One morning the Sanyasi had gone
...only the smell of opium remained

One morning, only an hour before our luuchtime, the door-
bell rang. Our maidservant ushered in a mendicant, gnarled
with age and covered with the red dust on the road. Our
cook immediately shouted at him. Get out of the house, we
do not want sanyasis here, walking into our rooms; if you
want alms, stay at the gate and ask for money, whoever heard
of beggars and fake sadhus ringing the doorbell and quietly
walking in.... I

The old man gave a toothless smile and deposited his bundle
on the floor. I am no beggar, he said in Malayalam, I am from
a respectable family in North Malabar, I have been a pilgrim
for the past forty years and I have seen all the holy places of our
country, Kasi, Rameshwaram, Haridwar, Puri, Kedarnath, Bad-
rinath....

We asked the maidservant to bring him a glass of butter-
milk immediately. My mother was called downstairs to meet
the pilgrim. My name is Pathiyar, said the old guest. The cook
stood by, grumbling, but none of us paid him any heed.

We were fascinated by the slow dialect of the sanyasi. He told
my mother that he had been tired of all earthly pleasures while
still in comfortable middle age and had walked out like the
Buddha, one night, to seek his peace. Now I am eighty-eight,
he said, and I am weary with travel. If you will allow me to
rest here for a day I shall be strong enough to leave this city and
go to Puri.

KAMALA DAS

59

Yes, you may, I cried, knowing well that my mother was
inclined to be hospitable. Don’t tell me later that I did not
warn you, muttered the cook. I know these types. They are
fakes. The old man smiled at the words. Do not worry my
son, he said. I shall never be a burden on any one.

After getting my father’s permission we moved him into the
alcove behind the stairs where he spread out his belongings. A
conch, two black saligrams, a bell, an incense burner and a
hookah made of a coconut shell. Is this hookah for a pooja,
asked our sarcastic cook. The maidservant was annoyed with
her husband’s attitude. She was fascinated by the old man’s
tales. To find one in Calcutta with whom she could communi-
cate in her native tongue, she thought a blessing.

Do read my palm she used to tell him. Sanyasis are suppos-
ed to be fortune-tellers. The old man said, caressing her plump
fingers, that she was to exercise greater caution in dealing with
someone who was very close to her. He is a serpent in disguise,
said the sanyasi. He will one day deceive you. He is only after

your gold chain and your earrings Who is this viper that you

are talking of, asked the girl. Need I tell you my child, said the
old man with his forgiving grin.

He used to make her very neurotic with his gloomy predic-
tions. At night in the room above the kitchen, she quarrelled
bitterly with her new husband, doubting his love. Won’t this
old dog ever lea-ve this house, asked the cook every morning
while he served us breakfast.

A week went by, but the sanyasi was still with us. He was
fast regaining strength and was in a happy mood all the
time. He used to sing bawdy songs to me in the evenings after
my return from school, but I understood little and liked not
their meaning but their lilt.

One morning when my father was coming down the stairs at
eight -thirty for his breakfast, the smell of the mendicant’s hoo-
kah reached his nostrils. Is the old one still here, asked my
father. Yes he is, my mother said weakly. Then ask him to
leave today after his lunch. We can’t possibly keep him for
ever.

60

MY STORY

After father had left the old man. called me aside. Your
father wants me to leave. I have grown very fond of this family.
He was unashamedly weeping. I too wept with him. The maid-
servant came on the scene and began to bawl. It was a horri-
ble scene. Then my mother promised to plead with my father
for the old man who did not seem to be in a state fit for travel-
ling.

It was while the sanyasi was staying with us that I first rec-
ognized myself to be a Hindu. He was antagonistic towards
our driver who was a Moslem. Moslems cannot be trusted, he
used to tell me, puffing on his hookah. Why not, I asked him.
I had, at that time, several friends who were Muslims. Our
eye- specialist was a pleasant doctor named Ahmed who used to
joke with me and make me laugh a lot. The driver Morfed
was an affectionate man. Mark my words, said the old man,
ominously, there will be a war very soon, and the Muslims will
molest our Hindu girls and kill all our sons. 1 was aghast. The
maidservant nearly swooned. This old man is a fake, said the
cook. He is no saint if he can hate any community so terribly.
Besides he smokes opium....

One morning before we woke up, the man had gone, taking
with him the conch, the incense burner, the bell and the hookah.
Only the smell of opium remained under the staircase. He has
left slyly like a thief, said the cook. He has left like a God, he
has vanished, said the maid. After school, coming home I had
no longer any one to tell me of religion and its base activities.

It was the year 1947, the early part of it, and rioting had
begun in Calcutta. There was a story going round at the school
that the Hindus had come to seek out Aulad, the peon and kill
him, but that one of the teachers had hidden him under her
bed. I was to go to Dr. Ahmad on a Friday at five-thirty to
have my eyes tested, but on Thursday his body was cut up by
some Hindus and dumped into a dustbin. Off and on we would
hear from the distance religious slogans shouted by the rioters
who went about in processions at dusk, holding aloft their sticks
and weapons.

The schools were closed and also the shops. We ate rice and
dal at lunch and at supper, for there were no vegetables to be

KAMALA DAS

61

had anywhere, and no meat. It was also impossible to go home
to Malabar or even to communicate with my grandmother. The
postal system broke down totally. Once we saw a lorry filled
with laughing people, mostly Sikhs, carrying aloft the yellow
body of an old woman impaled on a spear.

Instead of Morfed, a driver named Naresh, started to drive
my father to his office. He was resourceful and clever. He had
with him in the glove compartment a Moslem fez cap and a
Hindu turban. When he had to go near Park Circus, a Muslim
area, he donned the fez cap to fool the people. In the predo-
minantly Hindu areas he walked with his turban. He used to
bring for us secret gifts of a small pumpkin or a banana procur-
ed from behind the Park Circus Bazar.

Then we moved southwards to a smaller house at Lake Ave-
nue. A week after we moved in, there was a loud cry at eight
in the evening coming towards our house. The processionists
were shouting Allahu Akbar in hoarse voices. The landlord, a
doctor in his sixties, took out his rifle and alerted his grown-up
son to watch at the gate for the rioters. My father, helpless
with only a walking stick to protect himself with, walked up to
the gate with them. The women huddled in a room upstairs,
sobbing softly. I was too excited to sob. I sat on the stairs
with the landlord’s second son and discussed the Chinese me-
thods of torture.

It was an anti-climax when the rioters were dispersed before
they neared our street and we had to go home and fall asleep,
thinking of bloodshed and religion....

18

Was every married adult a clown in
bed, a circus performer ?

The Lake Avenue flat in Calcutta was small, with only two
bedrooms, a compact sitting room, an open corridor at the
back and the dining room, kitchen and pantry on the mezzanine
floor.

On the first floor lived our landlord, his fat wife and two
sons. We had at the entrance to our drawing-room four wide
steps of imitation marble where we sat with our informal callers
in the evening, gazing at the garden. The hedges were well-
trimmed and the seasonal flowers were well-tended.

There was only one large cane chair in the garden which
was nearly all the time occupied by the old landlord. He
used to be handsome and elegant. He smoked a pipe every
morning after his breakfast which he ate alone in his private
room on the ground floor, adjacent to our corridor.

He was a loner. His wife used to get attacks of hysteria
almost twice a month, during which she abused him in Bengali
and kept asking him where he had hidden his British concubine.
The sons used to walk away from the house in embarrassed
silence and return hours later, when she had turned quiet. The
doctor paid no heed to all her wailing and ranting. He sat on
the white cane chair, smoking his pipe. On some days when he
was away at his dispensary, the wife would accost the driver
and coax him to tell her about her husband’s mistress. You
take him to her many times every week, you must know her
address....

KAMALA DAS

63

We did not have many visitors. There were only two coup-
les who visited our house regularly. Mr. and Mrs. Panicker
who were my parents’ friends for several years and a younger
couple, Mr. and Mrs. Kunhappa. Mrs. K. was exquisitely lovely
and very fashion-conscious. When she appeared at our door
one day wearing a charcoal grey sari with large polka dots and
a necklace of leopard-claws, I was startled by her beauty.

She talked to me of the cucumber juice that she mixed with
cream to apply over her face each afternoon to retain her
porcelain-smooth complexion. She was frank with me and to
my frank questions she gave frank answers although at that
time I did not even believe all that I heard. I could not for a
moment believe that all the dignified couples coming to my
house to discuss politics and literature with my parents, could
in the dark perform sexual acrobatics to get what my dear
friend called the great orgasm. She made me laugh in disbelief.
Was every married adult a clown in bed, a circus-performer ?
I hate marriage, I told her. I hate to show myself naked to
anyone....

During that period when I was fourteen my father arranged
for me to have an art-tutor. He was twenty-nine, pale-com-
plexioned and tall. He wore the loose clinging dress of the rich
Bengalee. He taught me on the first day to draw Kala Lakshrai
and he pronounced the Goddess’s name as Kola Lokhi. You
have a good hand, he said appreciatively. He came to teach me
every Wednesday in the evening, and instead of asking the cook
to serve him tea I brought the tray down to him laden with tea,
idlis, vadas and steamed banana. He spoke with respect and it
seemed to me that in his eyes I was an adult. While he touched
up what I drew, I watched with fascination his pink earlobes
and his serene mouth.

I bought a white sari with a red border, the type the Bengali
peasants wore, and draped myself in it to conceal my boyish
body. I was in such a hurry to grow up that it began to show
in the way I brushed my hair whipping it as one would whip
a snake to kill it and in the way I stared at myself in the mirror
for long lost moments. My parents began to notice the change
in me. I was dressing for the tuition, I was wearing a sari for

64

MY STORY

him and I was nearly tripping, coming down the stairs carrying
the heavy tea tray. So one day the tuition was discontinued,
my father telling my tutor that I needed all the time available
to do well in the school-exams. He went away nodding in
agreement.

After he left saying goodbye, I realised that I loved him.
Lying on my narrow bed at night all I could think of was his
face and his earlobes. What a fool I had been to have resisted
the temptation to kiss his mouth, I wanted to go to Mrs.
Kunhappa and seek her advice. But I was afraid that she might
only laugh at my infatuation. I talked to a much younger friend,
a school-mate, and without hesitation she put me on a bus that
took me as far as the place where he worked. You must tell
him what you feel for him, my friend had said helping me climb
into the bus.

I was nervous and my blue school-tunic was clinging to my
back soaked in perspiration. After I had got on to the bus I
discovered that I had not enough money to return home. Fight-
ing back my tears, I waited for the bus to stop and then jumped
down. There was a courtyard which I had to cross before I
could reach his room. A large square with one pockmarked
statue of a God at its centre. By the time I reached the statue
the rain began.

In Bengal, the rain falls suddenly, with no warning, like the
hysterical tears of a woman who herself does not know why
she must suddenly burst into tears. I was totally drenched in
a minute. I tried unsuccessfully to bend my head beneath the
God’s face to protect it from the lash of the rain. I did not
know the name of the God. His face was pitted with the rains
of centuries but his mouth was startlingly beautiful, an unformed
smile softening the outlines. For a moment or two I stood there
hugging him and then I remembered the other mouth, the pink
earlobes and all the hours of hungering, and ran into his room,
throwing open the door noisily, rudely.

He was seated at his table with some yellowing files in front
of him. He raised his eyes. Thumi ? He asked me in Bengali.
You ? The rain swept the dust of the courtyard into his room.
He rose from his chair and shut the door.

KAMALA DAS

65

I clung to his shirt-front sobbing uncontrollably. You are
wet, you must change your clothes, he mumbled. He pulled my
tunic over ray head and wrung the water out through the
window. His fingers were warm on my skin. Then with a
handtowel he dried my hair and put the tunic on my body
again. And, without another word he took me by taxi to my
house and shook my hand at the gate.

Aren’t you coming in, I asked him. No, not today, he said.
That was the last time I saw him. But oif and on I remembered
the tenderness with which he pulled aside my dress and dried
my body.

Why did he not kiss me ? Why didn’t he make love to' me ?

I asked my friend in school why my first adult meeting with
him gave me only disappointment. You never told him you
loved him, she said. It is only when a man knows that a girl
loves him that he kisses her. You got such a golden chance
to have a love alTair and all you did was cry and make a fool
of yourself...

19

Her voice was strange.. .it was easy for me
to fall in love with her

One of my teachers invited me once for lunch to her little
flat at Harish Mukherji Road. I was fond of her and could
not refuse, although my father was not too pleased about
sending me alone to a stranger’s house.

When I reached the place, my teacher held my hands in her
own large ones and said that her husband had taken ill suddenly
in the morning and that there was no time to inform me of a
change in the programme. But my son will take you out for
lunch, she said.

Her son was eighteen and during other visits to their house,
he had played on the piano for me. He was of medium height
and had an aged face with deep lines on his forehead and a
wide mouth.

I went with him to a place called Paletti’s and sat down on
the balcony at a wrought-iron table. The waiters who had
seen me there several times lunching with my father and his
friends, hovered around anxious to serve us. The lunch hour
was yet to begin and the place was nearly empty. Beneath us
a man wearing dark clothes strummed a guitar glancing at us
now and then. My companion covered my hand with his. Do
you recognize the tune, he asked. I felt all of a sudden poor.
The cultural poverty of my home was appalling. Although my
mother was a well-known poetess, there were few visitors who
could talk earnestly about art or literature. My parents did
not care for music either.

KAMALA DAS

67

I was an awkward savage. It is Bach, he said. Then hiding
my face with my hands, I burst into tears. What is wrong, he
asked me. The guitarist stopped his song. Did I say something
to upset you, Kamala, my escort asked me. I shook my head.
Take your soup, he said, it is turning cold.

And, while eating our lunch, I told him that I lacked music
in my life and grace. I couldn’t live without music, he said. He
lent me his checked handkerchief to wipe my face. You are red
with crying, I don’t know what my mother would think, seeing
you like this, he said.

When I returned home I did not tell my mother what had
happened. She never asked any questions. My father too
was entirely without curiosity. They took us for granted and
considered us mere puppets, moving our limbs according to the
tugs they gave us. They did not stop for a moment to think
that we had personalities that were developing independently,
like sturdy shoots of the banyan growing out of crevices in the
walls of ancient fortresses.

When my - Austrian teacher returned home with her family,
a Bengali lady came to teach us English. She had a long face
and nervous hands that kept running up her shoulder to pat the
folds of her sari while she taught us Dickens. Her voice was
strange, fractured in the middle and I thought it beautiful. It
was easy for me to fall in love with her, for I had at that time a
need to squander, but there were no takers. I wrote a poem
addressed to my teacher in which I likened her to a rose. I was
a flower too and this odd attachment of a flower to another was
tragic. When I went to her room for tea one afternoon, she
told me that she had liked the poem. I felt myself blushing.
I am going home to Malabar for a month, I told her. May I
write you a letter ?

Then my mother fell ill with typhoid. For a month her
homeopath treated her and finally, when she became uncon-
scious, Dr. Denham White was called to save her life. She was
in a coma for a month. After school I used to go into the
room to see her lie there emaciated and still as a corpse. My
father could not stand the mental strain and he fell ill too. We
had to put him in the drawing room as the third bedroom was

68

MY STORY

to be for the little child, my young sister. There was no Chloro-
mycetine at that time to mitigate the harm typhoid did. All
we could do was pray.

A friend of my parents, Janaki Amma, came one day with a
suitcase and said that she was going to look after us until our
parents recovered. She was a professor at The Brabourne
College and was the most vivacious lady I had ever met. She
had a tinkling laugh that attracted people. She was a magnetic
person. What I recollect now of that period in our life more
than even the sight of my mother lying in a coma or my father
weeping like a child in sheer helplessness, is the smell of the
Cuticura ointment that Miss Janaki used to rub into her hair
before going to bed, pacing up and down in our room like a
vibrant tigress. At times I used to rest my head on her bosom
while she lay reading a book. Then she would begin to tease
me about my English teacher. I want to see this grand lady,
Janaki Amma said. I want to see this person who has cast such
a spell on you. If you promise not to laugh I shall introduce
her to you one day, I said. I cannot bear it if you laugh at
her...

After my mother recovered and then my father, our house
fell apart. My mother went home to Malabar for rest, carrying
with her the little girl and my brothers. The elder brother went
to Madras to study medicine. I was left alone with my father
in Calcutta. Except for the two of us there were two servants
and my father’s younger brother. It was a period of intense
loneliness for me. I had none to turn to for advice. Nobody
bothered about me. I was free to do what I liked. All that
was expected of me was that I should be home before six to be
present when my father returned from his ofiSce. After taking
a cup of tea, my father went out again for a walk beside the
lakes or for a visit to any of his friends. The cook was busy
with his friends in his dingy domain or busy making love to the
maidservant. I felt myself to be an intruder in any room other
than mine, where on a narrow bed among library books, I slept
an uneasy sleep and woke hearing the clatter of spoons in the
tea tray being carried by the cook to my father’s room.

I lost interest in lessons. Every morning I told myself that

KAMAI.A I>AS

69

I must raise myself from the desolation of my life and escape,
escape into another life and into another country. I was too
diffident to venture out of my house alone. I stood beside our
gate looking out, but the Lake Avenue in Calcutta is a lonely
street and very few walk on it. Once or twice I saw a Chinaman
on a bike with a large bundle and I called him in to see what
he had to sell. I did not have any money to buy the nighties
he spread out on the floor.

One day a seller of georgette sarees came in and talked for
an hour about Sind. He said his name was Lokumal. The
Sonpapriwala stood at our gates, smiling into my eyes. Don’t
you wish to eat sweets, he asked me in Bengali. I smiled and
walked away. The neighbour’s little daughter bought sheets of
the crunchy sweet and ate them, sitting on the wall separating
our house.

I am going to be a film star when I grow up, she told me.
Her mother came to our house in the mornings to phone her
lover when all of us were away. Our cook pretended not to
understand English and stood by listening. He told me that
she was an immoral woman. Do not talk to her if you meet her,
he said. I have been asked to look after you and to protect
you from danger, and I certainly shall not shirk my duty...

20

She lay near me holding my body close to hers

A friend of my family had warned me against associating
with an 18 -year-old girl residing in a College hostel, but when I
went there with my mother, visiting her friends, I met her and
felt instantly drawn towards her.

She stood at the doorway smiling at us, revealing a fetching
gap between her front teeth and a dimple on her right cheek.
She was tall and sturdy with a tense masculine grace. Hello,
she said. I wanted to leave my mother and go into the young
lady’s room to make friends with her but I did not make any
move to get up.

I did not wish to displease my mother’s Professor-friends
who had cautioned me against the girl who was dilferent from
others. When her eyes held mine captive in a trance, for a rea-
son that I could not fathom, then I felt excited. Her skin was
bronzed with the sun. She was like an animal that had exposed
itself to the magnificent fury of the seasons, the suns, the rains
and the harsh dry winds that sweep the sands of deserts....

When summer arrived a year after my mother had gone
away to Malabar, my father decided to send me home for my
vacation with a batch of Professors and students in a large com-
partment which had ten berths. The longest berth was assigned
to me probably because I was the youngest and the smallest in
stature.

As luck would have it, the girl I admired was with us, and
when the lights were put out and the streaks of moonlight re-
vealed the settled limbs of the sleepers she crept close to me and

KAMALA DAS

71

asked me if she could sleep on the same berth with me; I hate
the upper berth, she said. She looked around first to see if any
one was awake. Then she lay near me holding my body close
to hers. Her fingers traced the outlines of my mouth with a
gentleness that I had never dreamt of finding. She kissed my
lips then, and whispered, you are so sweet, so very sweet, I have
never met anyone so sweet, my darling, my little darling

It was the first kiss of its kind in ray life. Perhaps my mo-
ther may have kissed me while I was an infant but after that
none, not even my grandmother, had bothered to kiss me. I was
unnerved. I could hardly breathe. She kept stroking my hair
and kissing my face and my throat all through that night while
sleep came to me in snatches and with fever. You are feverish,
she said, before dawn, your mouth is hot.

In the morning, a friend of our family received us at the sta-
tion and took us to his house which was adjacent to the big man-
sion owned by the Raja of Kollengode, whose son, a Major in
the army had been a family friend while he was at Calcutta with
special orderlies and all. Major Menon was amazed to see me
grown up and teased me about the way I wore my sari. I was
not accustomed to wearing sarees at that time but to travel
south I had to wear clothes that hid my legs fully, for, the ladies
at Nalapat were conservative, puritanical and orthodox.

Major Menon invited me and my gang to his place for lunch.
My host’s family was also invited. When all had left for the
lunch my friend took me to the bathroom and coaxed me to
to take a bath with her. Then she sprayed my body with the
host’s Cuticura and dressed me. Both of us felt rather giddy
with joy like honeymooners.

When we reached Menon’s house, the lunch, a traditional
Malayan feast, was laid out in all its glory. There were usual
dishes, the Kalan, the Sambar, the Olan, the Aviyal, the Elissery
and the condiments of mango and lime. Major Menon charm-
ed the adults with his wit and solicitude. He seemed grateful
to me for having brought into his home a bunch of charming
ladies, all unmarried. My friend and I ate little, and after the
meal while the grown-ups chatted in the dark lounge, the two

72

MY STORY

of US wandered into the garden to walk under the shady wood-
apples.

In the evening, we boarded the train again to go south-
wards. My friend forced me to eat the biriyani from her
plate. When the professors had settled down for the night she
came to me to kiss me goodnight. The berth was narrow this
time and so she could not lie with me. But she bent over me
kissing me passionately bringing to my nostrils the smell of the
the engine’s smoke and the strange sulphur of her perspiration.
When I walked away from the railway station where a relative
had been sent to fetch me home, she waved at me but I did not
wave back. I wished to put her out of my life, to bring back
the order that I had in my mind before I met her. But at Nala-
pat, lying in my late grandfather’s room and staring at the tops
of the old mango trees, it seemed to me that the older girl was
haunting me with her voice and with her smile....

After a week a relative of mine who used to be a regular
contributor to the magazine, jointly edited for years by my bro-
ther and myself, arrived on the scene. He was working in the
Reserve Bank of India at Bombay. Once he had sent me a poem
entitled ‘A Bank Clerk’s Dreams’, which was very moving. Then
again a story, slightly satirical, of a young man in Bombay cal-
led Prabhakar who did not know which direction to take, but
let simple lust lead him.

He wrote well. When he came on leave and visited us at
Nalapat he gazed at me in astonishment. I was in a striped
sari. You have become a lovely young woman, he said, I was
expecting to see a child. When I was a little child and staying
with my grandmother he had many a time lifted me by my
shoulders to swing me round and round like a ceiling fan. He
made me sit near him and he quoted from Huxley and Bertrand
Russell. He was thin, walking with a stoop and had bad teeth.
But he looked intellectual.

My favourite author at that time was Oscar Wilde and my
favourite poem the ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol*. He talked about
homosexuality with frankness. Many of us pass through that
stage, he said. I was afraid that my grandmother might come

KAMAI-A DAS

73

and hear the uninhibited talk. When the sky darkened, he look-
ed at it and rose to go. Will you walk with me to the hedge,
he asked me. At the hedge, beside the Damson tree, he embraced
me, and puzzled by his conduct I ran back to my house.

That very night my grandmother came to my room and
told me that I ought to marry him. Das is a very good young
man and entirely without vices. Your parents and his mother
feel that you two should get married soon. What is the hurry,
I asked her, knowing well that neither she nor anybody else of
the older generation would ever speak the truth to a fifteen-year-
old child.

It had been clear to me that my home was broken up for in-
comprehensible reasons. My mother was living in Malabar
while my father stayed on at Calcutta. It was not a complete
family like everybody else’s. Whenever all of us got together
and I began to feel secure, some cruel illogical destiny always
rudely brought the edifice down, like a house of cards. It was
obvious that my father wished to retire and come away to set-
tle down in Malabar with my mother. I was a burden and a
responsibility neither my parents nor my grandmother could
put up with for long. Therefore with the blessing of all, our
marriage was fixed. Not yet, I said. Let me go back to Cal-
cutta to finish my exam

Before I left for Calcutta, my relative pushed me into a dark
corner behind a door and kissed me sloppily near my mouth.
He crushed my breasts with his thick fingers. Don’t you love
me, he asked me, don’t you like my touching you — I felt hurt
and humiliated. All I said was “goodbye”.

21

His hands bruised my body and left blue and
red marks on the skin

Returning to Calcutta after my engagement I became moody
and my mind clouded over with doubts. Had I been reckless
in accepting the proposal ? He did not look healthy. Quoting
effortlessly from Aldous Huxley was not a major accomplish-
ment. Would he be a kind father to my children ? Would he
be considerate ?

My friends in Calcutta were shocked to hear of the engage-
ment. You are only a child, they said. You should complete
your education before thinking of marriage. It is all fixed, I
told them, so let us not waste time discussing it.

My father invited my fiance to Calcutta for a week’s stay,
and when he came from Bombay and got off the plane wearing
a woollen suit and his face unshaven, I watched him with
distaste, leaning against the railings at Dum Dum. In the car
on our way home, he pressed my fingers amorously and asked
me if I had changed. The driver was watching us in the rear
view mirror with amusement.

My father had bought tickets for us for every afternoon
show and had booked tables at the best hotels for our meals.
We were left alone and probably my father thought that I
would enjoy being alone with the young man. Whenever he
found me alone in a room, he began to plead with me to bare
my breasts and if I did not, he turned brutal and crude. His
hands bruised my body and left blue and red marks on the skin.
He told me of the sexual exploits he had shared with some of

KAMALA DAS

75

the maidservants in his house in Malabar. The poor women
born of a peasant stock were accustomed to a clumsy rapid
mating like that of the birds, for their men had very little time
to spare for niceties of any kind, since all the incomplete chores
waited for them, the hoeing, the ploughing, the chopping of
firewood and the feeding of livestock.

My cousin asked me why I was cold and frigid. I did not
know what sexual desire meant, not having experienced it even
once. Don’t you feel any passion for me, he asked me. I don’t
know, I said simply and honestly. It was a disappointing week
for him and for me. I had expected him to take me in his arms
and stroke my face, my hair, my hands and whisper loving
words. I had expected him to be all that I wanted my father to
be, and my mother. I wanted conversation, companionship and
warmth. Sex was far from my thoughts. I had hoped that
he would remove with one sweep of his benign arms, the
loneliness of my life...

When he went back to Bombay, my father told me that he
was happy to see that I had found my mate. The word mate
with its earthy connotations made me uneasy. 1 felt lost and
unhappy. I could not tell my father that I had hoped for a
more tranquil relationship with a hand on my hair and a voice
in my ear, telling me that everything was going to be all right
for me. I had no need at all for rough hands riding up my skirts
or tearing up my brassiere.

I did not know whom to turn to for consolation. On a
sudden impulse, I phoned my girl-friend at the hostel. She was
surprised to hear my voice. I thought you had forgotten me,
she said. I invited her to my house. She came to spend a
Sunday with me and together we cleaned out our bookcases and
dusted the books. Only once she kissed me. Our eyes were
watering and the dust had swollen our lips. Can’t you take
me away from here, I asked her. Not for another four years,
she said. 1 must complete ray studies, she said. Then holding
me close to her, she rubbed her cheek against mine.

When I put her out of my mind I put aside my self-pity too.
It would not do to dream of a different kind of life. My life
had been planned and its course charted by my parents and
relatives. I was to be the victim of a young man’s carnal hunger

76

MY STORY

and perhaps, out of our union, there would be born a few chil-
dren. I would be a middle-class housewife, and walk along the
vegetable shops carrying a string bag and wearing faded chappals
on my feet. I would beat my thin chidren when they asked for
expensive toys, and make them scream out for mercy. I would
wash my husband’s cheap underwear and hang it out to dry in
the balcony like some kind of a national flag, with wifely pride. . .

During that morose month, a family-friend arrived with her
little daughter and her 1 8 -year old son to stay as house guests
for a month. The lady had several friends in the city and
visiting them kept her busy. The son was with me all the time
taking my photographs with a camera that his uncle, an
ambassador, had brought for him from China and singing
Hindi film songs. He took me to the Victoria Memorial and
posed me against trees and against the flowing water.

I felt beautiful when he was with me, arranging my
limbs shyly with a blush pinking his cheeks. He was stocky
and fair-skinned. He had taken part in revolutionary
activities and was a student-leader. What are you planning
to be, I asked him. I shall graduate and then get out of
the damn country, he said. He was unhappy at home. He
found in me a kindred soul. You are getting married, he said,
one day ; I wonder why you are in such a hurry. I want to
escape too, I said. He nodded. We sat for hours on the grass
chewing the wheat grass and sharing a silence that was as gentle
as the winter’s sun. My cook told me that together we made
an excellent couple. Marry this young man, he told me. He is
young and healthy. But he has no job. How will he maintain
me, I asked him. All girls are the same, said the cook. They
only think of money.

When the young man reached his home town, he wrote that
he would come to attend my wedding. I did not reply to his
letter.

I got married in the month of February. The mango trees
were in brown bloom and the blue bees flew about humming
in the sun. All the flowering trees were in bloom including
the ancient Nirmatala which perfumed even the inner rooms
with its spring.

KAMALA DAS

77

For days before the wedding the servants and field-hands
dug up the clumps of grass and smoothed down the yards filling
the gorges and taming boundaries. They constructed a shamiana
with thatched palm leaves and decorated it with garlands of
white paper flowers. They spread unbleached linen on the reed
mats and wrapped the pillars with coloured paper. Beyond
that in the garden they made a small pond and filled it with
lotuses that looked wilted on the wedding day. All the guests
commented on the magnificence of the garden where little
mango trees with ripe fruits had been uprooted and planted in a
row. My father beamed with pleasure. Every one talked of it
as the most expensive wedding of the year. Behind the house
in the open yard the cooks from Calicut had set up their own
tents and were busy making sweets and the traditional dishes of
a Nayar wedding. One of the rooms contained nothing but
laddoos. Another contained fruits.

All this glut made me feel cheap and uncomfortable.
Marriage meant nothing more than a show of wealth to families
like ours. It was enough to proclaim to the friends that the
father had spent half a lakh on its preparations. The bride was
unimportant and her happiness a minor issue. There was
nothing remotely Gandhian about my wedding. On the night
after the wedding there was to be a Kathakali show for which
the best players had been brought from Kalamandalam. When
I remarked cynically on the extravagance, my grandmother
scolded me. You ought to feel grateful to your father for
arranging such a lavish wedding for you, she said. Go up to
your room and rest there. I do not want our relatives to think
that the bride is a tomboy.

I was too excited by the noise and the bustle to hide in my
room looking demure and shy. I hid myself in the servant’s
quarters. It was obvious to me that I did not at all match the
grandeur of the marquee and the garden. The backdrop deserved
a more elegant bride, one who was glamorous and beautiful. A
dynamo lit up all the coloured bulbs hanging from the trees
and on the eve of the wedding I ran with other children all over
the garden nlavine hide and seek noisily while our older relatives

78

MY STORY

slept out their fatigue lying on the new mats spread out on the
cool floor of the hall.

When I finally went up to sleep, the clock in the hall chimed
four times and my mother rose from her bed for the morning
prayer. Two hours later my grandmother woke me up and
sent me for a bath. You are the bride, she said, people should
not see you before your bath. Wear a good saree and go to
the temple for your prayers, she said and when I opened my
eyes wide and gazed at her, her eyes slowly filled up with with
tears. Are you crying, I asked her. Why should I cry, child,
she said, today is a happy day for all of us.

I pushed my way through strangers and went in to bathe. My
maidservant had placed in the bathroom two pots of oil, some
lentil paste and the shampoo made of the leaves of the hibiscus.
I merely washed myself with a soap in a hurry and dressed
myself in a white sari.

The young relatives cried out in disappointment ; you don’t
look a bride, you are too plain to be a bride, they exclaimed.

22

Wedding night : Again and again he hurt me
and all the while the Kathakali drums
throbbed dully

What I remember most of my marriage day was that I let
down my eighteen-year-old friend who had made me promise
to sit near him during the evening’s Kathakali show. The Ka-
thakali started after everyone had had dinner and the moon was
right above our house, circular and blazing.

My house emptied itself of people and I found myself alone
with my husband who told me that it was not his intention to
see the Kathakali. Let us stay at home, he said pulling me to
the bedroom where the gifts we had received lay scattered on
the floor and the bed-sheet was crumpled and untidy. The ser-
vants had forgotten to arrange the room before leaving for the
show.

I took off my sari which was of heavy gold tissue and sat on
the bed. Then without warning he fell on me, surprising me by
the extreme brutality of the attack. I tried unsuccessfully to
climb out of his embrace. Then bathed in perspiration and with
my heart palpitating wildly, I begged him to think of God. This
is our wedding night, we should first pray to Krishna, I said.
He stared at me in disbelief. Was I mad ?

The rape was unsuccessful but he comforted me when I ex-
pressed my fear that I was perhaps not equipped for sexual
congress. Perhaps I am not normal, perhaps I am only a eunuch,
I said, and in pity he held me close to him and said, even if

80

MY STORY

that is so, we shall be happy living together.... Again and again
throughout that unhappy night he hurt me and all the while the
Kathakali drums throbbed dully against our window and the
singers sang of Damayanti’s plight in the jungle.

By morning I could hardly move my limbs but when my mo-
ther woke me up at six to meet the guests who were going away
I slid down the stairs and saw my friend with the camera slung
over his shoulder looking up at me. My eyes filled with tears,
but I could not speak. He looked at me for a minute or two
and without a word went his way.

We did not get away for a honeymoon. My husband came
from a joint family and had several young cousins who liked
to flock around him admiringly. He wanted to bask in their
love and remain where he was. I was to become just another of
his admirers, one more relative to submit to his clumsy fond-
ling. I remained a virgin for nearly a fortnight after my mar-
riage. He grew tired of the physical resistance which had noth-
ing to do with my inclinations.

I was at that time deeply in love with him and would have
undergone any torture to be able to please him, but my body
was immature and not ready for lovemaking. For him such
a body was an embarrassment, veteran that he was in the rowdy
ways of sex which he had practised with the maids who worked
for his family.

I thought then that love was flowers in the hair, it was the
yellow moon lighting up a familiar face and soft words whis-
pered in the ear... At the end of the month experiencing rejection,
jealousy and bitterness I grew old suddenly, my face changed
from a child’s to a woman’s and my limbs were sore and
fatigued. Then we went to Bombay to stay with his friends who
were unmarried, in a little flat called ‘Deepak’ at Santa Cruz,
where we were given permission to sleep in the sitting room at
midnight after the card -playing visitors had left. Before dawn
I rose to wash my face and to fold up my mattress before the
others came into the room to read the newspaper which was
thrown at five from the road beyond the iron gate.

KAMALA DAS

81

The men ate their breakfast of rice and hot curry at nine,
calling it lunch and afterwards went to work, leaving me alone
with the cook who wandered around until five when he returned
to receive his masters and give them tea. I was hungry and
miserable during those days, and when I became pregnant, the
continual vomiting made me worse.

One day I fainted in the bathroom and lay there on the
damp floor for a while, becoming conscious much later, feeling
the water flowing beneath my head, and hearing its swishing
sounds. 1 lost weight rapidly. I did not get enough sleep at
night, for my husband took me several times with a vengeance
and in the day there was no food for twelve hours after that
chilli-laden meal of rice and curry.

One day my father arrived from Calcutta on some oflBcial
work and came from Taj Mahal Hotel where he was staying to
see me. He took me out to the Victoria Garden Zoo for he
knew that I was fond of seeing animals, and, together we sat on
the circular wall of the pond where the alligators resided and
he asked me why I looked so thin. I thought you would put
on some weight after marriage, he said. I wished then to cry
and to tell him that he had miscalculated and that I ought not
to have married the one I did, but I could not bring myself to
hurt him.

My father was an autocrat and if he went wrong in his deci-
sions he did not want ever to hear about it. I was mature
enough then to want to protect his faith in himself. After an
hour he took me to a shop and bought me a Singer Sewing
Machine.

In the evenings, my husband took me for walks but my legs
used to hurt, hungry that I was and weak with vomitings. I
was not much of a companion for him. Any sign of kindness
from people made me weep like a child. He grew weary of my
temperament very soon and one day suggested that I go home
to my grandmother for rest. I disliked the idea, for seeing him
and sleeping near him had become precious to me. I cannot
get on without you, I said. But his friends, who felt pity for
my condition persuaded him to send me home.

82

MY STORY

Tearing myself away from the man who did not ever learn
to love me, I went back to Malabar with an uncle who had
been sent to take me home. My grandmother wept when
she saw me. She called an Ayurvedic physician to get me exa-
mined for illnesses which may have seized me in Bombay. Under
his treatment and in the care of my grandmother, I forgot my
miserable honeymoon days and became once more healthy.

In the mornings I went into the prayer room with my grand-
mother and sat for an hour listening to her read the Bhagava-
tham and the Gita. One day I felt a quickening in my womb and
knew that my child had become a live being. My son is moving,
I whispered to my grandmother. How do you know it is a
son, asked my grandmother, smiling at me. It will be a son
and he will look like Krishna, I told her.

Through the smoke of the incense I saw the beauteous smile
of my Krishna. Always, always, I shall love you I told him,
not speaking aloud but willing Him to hear me, only you will
be my husband, only your horoscope will match with mine....

23

A gold coin for love

The best toy that can. be given to a teenaged girl is a live
baby, a soft, smooth-skinned doll that she can bathe, powder
and suckle to sleep.

When the labour began, I put old records on the gramaphonc
and chatted courageously with my cousins who had come to
watch me have the baby. All of them sat outside my door,
leaning against the verandah wall. The most excited of all was
my younger brother who kept asking me every minute or so if
the baby was coming out.

I was not prepared for the great pain that finally brought
the baby sliding along my left thigh, and I could not smother
my scream. But the doctor who was my friend Raji’s father
patted me on my cheek and said, “Well done Joe, you have a
lovely little son.”

Everybody flocked in then to admire the little one who had
a high forehead and a milky skin. I shrieked with delight when
I saw him for the first time. I shall call him Monoo, I said. He
looks so much like Lord Byron... In those days I had on my
dressing table a photo of the dead poet. I had wanted my son
to look like him. There was something wrong with Monoo’s
feet when he was born. It used to fold up like an unused wing
against his leg. Even the flaw delighted me. Did not Byron
have a defective foot too ?

My grandmother repaired the foot with daily massage. My
grandmother and my mother-in-law sat for hours on the sou-
thern portico fondling the child and admiring his charms. Now

84

MY STORY

and then I would pause in my games to rush to my son and
feed him at my breast. I did not wish to give him anything
other than the nourishment that I held in my body. He thrived
on it and grew plump and lovely.

Having him at my side during the night reminded me of my
husband and I wrote asking him to come home on leave. When
he arrived, he grew disgusted with the child who woke up seve-
ral times during the night to take his feed. Take him away to
your grandmother’s room, he cried angrily. I cannot sleep with
all this noise and fussing. The baby clung to me and I sensed
that he too felt the humiliation of our position.

I took him to my grandmother and the three of us slept
soundly on her single mattress laid out on the floor. Before I
fell asleep I told my grandmother that I should have done better
at Arithmetic in school. Why do you say this now, asked my
grandmother. Then I wouldn’t have been married off so soon,
I said. She laughed, covering me and my son with a shawl,
gently.

During his stay in Malabar, he spent most of his time with
his cousins and his sister-in-law, paying me little attention and
never bothering to converse with me. At night he was like a
chieftain who collected the taxes due to him from his vassal
simply and without exhilaration. All the Parijata that I wove
in my curly hair was wasted. The taking was brutal and brief.
The only topic of conversation that delighted him was sex and I
was ignorant in the study of it. I did not have any sex-appeal
either. I was thin, and my swollen breasts resembled a papaya
tree. How much more voluptuous were my maidservants who
took for my husband his bath- water and his change of clothes
while he waited impatiently in the dark bathroom at Nalapat !

I yearned for a kind word, a glance in my direction. It be-
came obvious to me that my husband had wished to marry me
only because of my social status and the possibility of financial
gain. A coldness took hold of my heart then. I knew then
that if love was what I had looked for in marriage I would have
to look for it outside its legal orbit. I wanted to be given an
identity that was lovable.

KAMALA DAS

85

When he returned to Bombay the first letter that he wrote
was not to me but to a girl-cousin who had allowed him to hug
her while he walked towards my home in the evenings. I made
up my mind to be unfaithful to him, at least physically.

My father was at that time getting built a modem house
only a few yards away from the old Nalapat House, for he was
a non-vegetarian and wanted such fare that could never be
allowed in the Nalapat kitchen. Among the workers, there was
a young bricklayer who had come from another village on con-
tract. He was extremely handsome. My cousins and I kept
visiting the site to watch him at work. He used to make indecent
suggestions to my maidservant which she confided in me. I
thought it a good idea to have him as a pet.

When the work was nearly over I sent my maidservant to
the place where he was staying with a gold coin as my gift and
an invitation to meet me near the shrine of the Bhagavati in the
evening after moonrise. But my maid came back to tell me
that he had already left for his village. I did not know his
address. Find out where he lives and get him back to this village
I told her. I shall give you my gold chain if you get him this
week...

I was ready for love. Ripe for a sexual banquet. It showed
in the way I walked and in my voice that had gradually ceased
resembling a boy’s. A cousin of ours one day grabbed me when
I was climbing the stairs whispering, “you are so beautiful”
and although I did not believe him, in sheer gratitude I let him
hold me in his arms for a couple of minutes. He panted with
his emotion. When he kissed me on my mouth I disliked the
smell of his stale mouth.

That was probably the most bewitching spring of my life.
The bhajans of Meera on my gramaphone, amorous cousins and
the clusters of Neermatala at the snakeshrine. And, in the
night the moon grazing at the outlines of my baby-son’s face
and his fingers at my breast. My husband faded into an unreal
figure, became a blush on the horizon after the sim had set. I
had stopped loving him. When his letters came, I put them away
in a drawer. He wrote mostly about a friend of his who stayed
at the Y.M.C.A. with him and was his constant companion.

86

MY STORY

You will like him very much when you meet him, he wrote.

Ultimately it was decided that I must join my husband and
resume my marital life. My cousins were heart-broken. No
more singing and no more walking in the evenings. My mother-
in-law and two servants accompanied me to Bombay where a
small flat had been bought at Hari Nivas near Dadar for all of
us to stay in. It had a common verandah where the neighbour’s
servants stood peering into our rooms to see if we were modest-
ly dressed while relaxing at home. This irked my mother-in-law.

She was a member of one of the wealthiest joint families in
Malabar and was also its eldest lady. The city’s shabby met hods
of collecting sub-standard grains from the ration shops and living
shut up in little nests of concrete in the air seemed to her revolt-
ing. She was used to large open spaces and flowering trees.
She was used to hordes of servants obeying her slightest whim.

In Bombay at Hari Nivas near the Citylight cinema on a
street smelling of buffalo urine she was merely an old woman, a
Madrasi lady whose skin was fair as a Kashmiri’s, someone the
children and the servants could stare at when there was nothing
better to do and the evenings were long.

24

I sent the cook out to get some barbiturates

My mother-in-law grew visibly upset whenever anyone look-
ed in through our windows. She grumbled about the inconve-
niences of our flat which included the elderly maidservant who
had turned disobedient, the cook who cheated at accounts and
the proximity of girls who lured me out of my home to play a
version of hopscotch with them on the terrace.

Our next-door neighbours were the Marathes whose second
daughter at that time was a popular film actress with a busy
schedule. Her name was Usha Kiran. Her two young-
er sisters became my dear friends, and during the four weeks
preceding the Ganesh festival, we rehearsed on the terrace for
hours every evening, the many items of entertainment such as
the Gujarati Garba, the Punjabi Bhangra and the Hindi play.

The youngest girl, Pushpa, was gifted with a rich, vibrant
voice. She taught me the Marathi film-song, “Nachatho Varuni
Anand... Vachavi Pava Govind”... In their company I forgot
the bitterness of life and became for a few short hours the care-
free person that I was before I came to Bombay.

My mother-in-law sulked, for she felt that I was spending
too much time away from my child and my domestic responsi-
bilities. Whenever she said disgruntled things my husband grew
angry, and his anger was directed against me and the baby. The
servants could not get on with my mother-in-law. We are going
back to Malabar, they said every day, we cannot bear such nag-
ging. My husband was also missing his evenings with the young

88

MY STORY

man at the Y.M.C.A. and with me, he was terse and impatient.

One day, being able to bear it no longer, I sent the cook to
a chemists’ shop for a dozen tablets of Barbiturates.
No chemist would give them without a doctor’s prescrip-
tion. The cook, on his return, empty-handed, told me
with tears in his eyes, that he too would take some tablets if I
decided to kill myself. Then the maidservant came up to me
and said that she was planning to get run over by a bus. I can-
not live on like this, she said. All three of us were miserable.
My husband stopped me from going up to the terrace for the
rehearsals in the evening. You must remember you are a wife
and, mother, he said. My friends passing our window, glanced
at me with pity in their eyes.

Then I settled down to housekeeping and sewed the buttons
on and darned our old garments, all through the hot afternoons.
In the evening, I brought for my husband his tea and a plate of
snacks. I kept myself busy with dreary housework while my
spirit protested and cried, get out of this trap, escape... In the
mornings when my husband left for work, I ran behind him and
stood near the corner of the road where the cows were loitering
and the crows pulled out fishbones from the open garbage box-
es. Then I watched him walk away with his briefcase to-
wards the railway station to catch the first train to Church-
gate. It was only after my return that I bathed or changed my
dress.

Often, from behind the house and from the dirty seashore,
the smell of rotting fish would enter our back verandah, from
which I watched a municipal school’s children parade in the
morning, singing a patriotic song and the huts of the bootleg-
gers who buried their wares in tins at night and slept on char-
poys in the day, while the sun climbing over them, burnt their
skin black. The bootleggers were full of distrust for strangers
and once or twice when I went strolling past their colony, they
turned their hostile eyes towards me.

Of the many huts, one was bigger and its occupants were
better dressed. The man was short and handsome with a yellow
skin. His dress was a white singlet and a khaki pair of shorts

KAMALA DAS

89

but they were washed every day by his wife who seemed to love
working for him. She used to bring for him glasses of milk
while he lay on a charpoy under a tree, dozing. She fed him
well and although from my height, I could not hear what she
was telling him, by the look on her face, I could make out that
they were love-words. He was silent and sullen as all men are,
when they are being loved too deeply by a woman. He used to
gaze at her indifferently while she turned her back on him and
walked back to their hut.

Everybody in that colony showed him respect, even the po-
lice constables who used to come in trucks off and on to' poke
the ground with long iron rods to see if anything had been bur-
ied there. He would laugh aloud, seeing them at it. On some
days when he was not very sleepy, he would play with his little
sons throwing them in the air and catching them while they
chortled with joy. He liked to watch his wife washing their
rounded bodies near the hydrant, soaping them and rubbing
hard until they turned a burnished copper. He was obviously
proud of his progeny.

One day while I stood leaning over the railings of my. veran-
dah watching him sleep, he opened his eyes all of a sudden and
looked at me. They were eyes reddened with sleep and desire.
I felt uneasy while they grazed my limbs and withdrew to my
room in a hurry. One morning we woke up hearing a commo-
tion in the backyard and saw the police take him away in their
truck. They had at last found the liquor which he had made at
night in his hut and stored in two wooden barrels. His wife
ran behind the truck with the end of her pink sari flying for a
few yards, but he did not once look at her. He sat on one of
the barrels looking like a king, his handsome face impassive
and cold.

When my mother-in-law’s dissatisfaction increased and the
servants became constant grumblers, my husband decided to
send us all back to Malabar. The decision was welcomed by all.
One of his uncles came to Bombay to take us hbme. He was to
stay for three days only but being a dandy, had got made two
suits of sharkskin for the Bombay trip. He was a great one
for girls, a man with a reputation and so the first thing he wan-

90

MY STORY

ted to know from me was the address of a nurse named Meen-
akshi who had come to Bombay from onr village to take up a
job in one of the city hospitals.

I did not know such a person. He was very disappointed,
but with determination went out each morning to enquire at
every hospital for Meenakshi, for whom he had made such de-
licious plans and also the pink sharkskin suits.

When we left by train at last, we found as the occupant of
one berth, a well-known Congress woman who was delighted to
meet our uncle and together they enjoyed a lengthy conversation
that lasted until three in the morning. My mother-in-law was
tired and slept soundly on the train. I lay near the baby listen-
ing to the talk which sounded hypocritical and comic, I have
always been cherishing certain high principles, said the lady and
my uncle said, of course, of course, what else should a lady
cherish

25

The blood-stained moonlight

Before I returned to Bombay, my husband, on the advice of
his best friend, had sold our flat at Hari Nivas and moved
into a rented one at Khar to be near him. He probably felt
that such a move would alter favourably the nature of our
marriage. I had brought with me a cook, an ayah for the
baby son and a fifteen-year-old maid to help me with my toilet,
although we could hardly afford such a retinue.

My husband left for his office every morning before nine
and returned at ten in the night after our son had fallen asleep
in his room, on the babycot beneath which the old ayah spread
out her own mattress. There was no opportunity for the father
to get to know the child, or to learn to regard him as a distinct
personality.

Children are intuitive about people and feel more than adults
a sense of rejection, and, by and by, he began to dislike his
father who was only an ominous presence at the house on
Sundays.

Often he rose from his bed at midnight to come knocking
at my door, weeping aloud for me while the old woman mum-
bled comforting words sleepily and in a raucous voice. My
husband hated those midnight scenes and shouted at all three
of us. One night the two-year-old was locked up in the kitchen
and left to lie there on its cold floor bawling.

I felt miserable. I had lost whatever emotional contact I
once had with my husband who was at that time busy prepar-
ing for his superiors, a Rural Credit Survey Committee Report

92

MY STORY

and had no time at all for his family. His nerves were perpe-
tually on edge and I did not once try to argue with him. I let
him take my body every night, hoping that the act would relax
his nerves and make him tranquil. At night after all had
slept, I sat in our tiny sitting room, sobbing and trying hard to
believe in a destiny that might change for the better.

It was true that I had my friends, the ladies of the neigh-
bourhood who came every morning to taste what my cook had
made for my lunch and to sit on our sofas and gossip, but each
of them basked in the warmth of a successful marriage and
could never, never, understand why I was so dijBFerent and felt
so deprived.

I could not admit to all that my marriage had flopped. I
could not return home to the Nalapat House, a divorcee, for
there had been goodwill between our two families for three
generations which I did not want to ruin. My granduncle, the
poet Narayana Menon, had married from my husband’s family,
and, besides, my best friend in the world, Malati, was a member
of that family.

My parents and other relatives were obsessed with public
opinion and bothered excessively with our society's reaction to
any action of an individual. A broken marriage was as dis-
tasteful, as horrifying as an attack of leprosy. If I had at that
time listened to the dictates of my conscience and had left my
husband, I would have found it impossible to find another who
would volunteer to marry me, for I was not conspicuously
pretty and besides there was the two-year-old who would have
been to the new husband an encumbrance.

I did not have the educational qualifications which would
have got me a job either. I could not opt for a life of prosti-
tution, for I knew that I was frigid and that love for my husband
had sealed me off physically and emotionally like a pregnancy
that made it impossible for others to impregnate afterwards.
I was a misfit everywhere. I brooded long, stifling my sobs,
while in the four tiny rooms of our home, slept soundly, the
husband, the son, the old ayah, the cook and the young maid.

Once when my husband was away in Orissa on an official

KAMALA DAS

93

tour, my son ate some castor seeds which he plucked from a
hedge and became violently sick. After the incessant vomiting
the child turned blue and his skin became leathery. He resem-
bled a puppet fashioned to look like an old man, with dark rings
under his eyes and limbs that moved jerkily while he uttered
shrill little cries sounding like a bird’s. He kept calling out to
me, although I was the one who held him in my arms and
rubbed his rigid back, while he threw up quantities of greenish
vomit.

Our doctor who was an old man, seemed visibly upset. He
tried to comfort me by saying that God was never unkind
without a purpose which only He knew. The doctor brought
to our house at midnight, when everything else failed, the well-
known paediatrician. Dr. Patel, who began to inject glucose
into the child’s veins. I left the group and went to my kitchen
where I lay on the floor, praying for his recovery. In my
thoughts then, there was only the beautiful, the incomparably
beautiful face of Guruvayur’s Krishna and him smile. Childishly
I vowed that I would remove all my ornaments and lay them
at the idol’s feet if the child was saved. A few minutes later,
the child fell asleep and his breathing became normal.

The child’s illness was a shock. The growing misery inside
me, the darkness that lay congealed, removed from my face all
that was once pretty. I was like a house with all its lights put
out. I walked up and down in our rooms wearing a torn saree
and although my legs ached for rest, the movement went on
and on as if they were propelled by some evil power. I stopped
washing my hair. My husband told me that I was going mad.
Perhaps I was, but it was not within my power to arrest its
growth.

At this time my husband turned to his old friend for com-
fort. They behaved like lovers in my presence. To celebrate
my birthday, they shoved me out of the bedroom and locked
themselves in. I stood for a while, wondering what two men
could possibly do together do get some physical rapture, but
after some time, my pride made me move away. I went to my
son and lay near him. I felt then a revulsion for my womanli-
ness. The weight of my breasts seemed to be crushing me.

94

MY STORY

My private part was only a wound, the soul’s wound showing
through. Why are you weeping, Amma, asked my little son
and I shook my head, saying nothing, nothing....

Whenever I lay clutching my husband’s feet at night, I felt
that his love was never to be mine. It had luckier takers. One
night I left my sleeping family and went up to our terrace to
gaze down at the winding road that led up to Danda and the
fishing colony. There were puddles of moonlight in the court-
yard and on the roads.

I wanted, for a moment, to fling myself down, to spatter
the blanched brilliance of the moonlight with red blood stains.
The moon moved in haste as though it had a date to keep.
Under the lamp-post a mad beggar was doing a solo dance
lifting his emaciated hands in the air and muttering to himself.
The rhythm of his grotesque dance seized my legs. My hair
fell loose around my face. I felt then that I was dancing on
the most desolate pinnacle of the world. The dance of the last
human being....

When I returned home climbing down the dirty stairs, I
walked with the slow tread of a somnambulist. I lit the reading
lamp in our sitting room and began to write about a new life,
an unstained future.

Wipe out the paints, unmould the clay.

Let nothing remain of that yesterday....

I sent the poem to the journal of the Indian P.E.N. the next
morning. My grief fell like drops of honey on the white sheets
on my desk. My sorrows floated over the pages of magazines
darkly as heavy monsoon clouds do in the sky....

26

The first chapter of darkness

My old ayah was a vulgar, talkative woman who liked to
wander around making friends with the curious neighbours
who paid her money in exchange for delicious gossip or some
tobacco which she could tuck between her broken teeth.

She was particularly friendly with the bachelors of the lodges
nearby, where, on Sunday afternoons while we lay asleep, she
went to unload tales, imaginary or real. She used to mention
their names and praise their generosity, but I ignored such talk
or paid little heed.

I hated her loud voice and the gaudy way she dressed, nearly
always in a red blouse and with her eyes darkened with kajal
and her mouth reddened with betel.

One night, while my husband was away in Assam on an
official tour and I was lying asleep with a handkerchief tied
round my brow to quiet a headache, there was a knock on my
bedroom door. Then the door opened and I saw the dark forms
of my ayah and a thickset man approaching my bed. Don’t
you worry, said my ayah. This is the man I talked to you about,
the one who used to ask me often about you. He wants to talk
to you....

I sat up on the bed in shock and dazed with horror. Why
do you bring a stranger to me at this time of the night, I asked
the old woman. I am not going to hurt you, said the man as
he drew closer to me. Go away, please go away, I cried, hut
my voice sounded weak, even to my ears. The old woman left
us and closed the door, mumbling something. I realized then

96

MY STORY

that the stranger had bribed her to gain admission into my
room at night.

This was to be a rape-scene. I have a headache, I am
miserably ill, I said. Be kind to me and leave me alone. The
man threw himself down on my body with two strange groans.
He smelt of stale liquor and under his weight my limbs became
rigid and I wished to raise myself to vomit. Soon enough, after
an incomplete rape, he rolled off my body and lay inert at the
foot of the bed, hugging my cold feet. He kissed my toes.
Won’t you forgive me, child, he asked me. I was silent. Will
you talk about this to people, he asked me. His mouth on my
skin was hot. I shall forgive you, I whispered, but go away,
go away... Then he fell asleep.

I rose to go near my son who stirred from his sleep and
threw his arm around me. My heart thumped widly. When I
woke up, it was past seven and the rooms were filled with the
yellow sun. I went to my room and looked under the bed. I
opened the wardrobe to peer in. What are you looking for,
asked the ayah. Was it only a nightmare, the stench of liquor
and the tearing pain ? When I talked about the midnight visitor,
the old woman muttered aloud, child, you are mad...

From the next day I began to share my bedroom with my
son Monoo. We had devised a form of amusement which was
unique. I would hide under the bed behind the hanging
counterpane and talk to the child, disguising my voice. I am
Krishna, I would tell him. I have come from Vrindavan to talk
to you. And Monoo would believe it and begin a long con-
versation with the God-child, asking Him what He had for
breakfast and what games He played later. Monoo made
friends with all the major Gods of the Hindus this way, talking
to them while they hid beneath his bed. Often I would hold up
a packed gift of sweets, saying that it was a gift from Vrindavan.
Monoo would only see the tips of my fingers which would have
been painted blue with blue ink. Won’t you come to my birth-
day party, Monoo asked Krishna and He said of course I shall
be there...

There was an imaginary life running parallel to our real life.
I filled his childhood with magic and wonder. Always he smiled

KAMALA. DAS

97

with the sheer happiness of being alive. He sat on my knee
looking like the infant Krishna....

When I became pregnant for the second time, the foundations
of my sanity were shaken. Suddenly I took to eating meat and
fish. I became short-tempered and temperamental.

During the eighth month of my pregnancy, I went home to
Nalapat to be with my grandmother, who was distressed to see
the change in me. I would sit still, staring at a dot on the wall
for one or two hours, as though hypnotized. Has the child
forgotten how to laugh, asked my grandmother. Why has such
a change come over her....

My grandmother believed that all pregnant woman needed
to be given whatever they wished to eat or drink. So when I
told her that I had a craving to drink some alcoholic beverage,
she made arrangements for smuggling a bottle into the house,
getting my husband’s uncle to disguise the bottle so as to make
it look like a harmless iron tonic. It was brandy. I did not
know how it was to be drunk. My grandmother mixed a few
spoonfuls with warm water and gave it to me at bedtime. I sat
up that night, writing poetry. My face seemed to swell and
there was a warmth moving in me that soothed my nerves.

I was at that time staying in the new bungalow called
Sarvodaya, a few yards away from the Nalapat House. During
my tenth month, I was addicted to drinking Drakshaiishta, an
ayurvedic preparation made from grapes and molasses. The
drink used to intoxicate me, remove from me all the bitterness
learnt from life, and make me a happy-looking girl. One night
in my drunkenness, I groaned while lying asleep and immediately
my parents rushed to my bedside.

There was a grand pain moving within me, like a whale
turning on its belly all of a sudden in the sea. What is wrong,
Amy, are you getting any pain, asked my father. We heard you
moan in your sleep.

In half an hour the child was born. I put aside my sense of
decorum and shrieked aloud at the final stage of labour. The
midwife kept telling me that I ought to relax. My father, pacing
up and down on the portico downstairs, came running up the

98

MY STORY

stairs when he heard the baby cry. It was a little curly-haired
boy. We named him Priyadarsin.

My grandmother and my mother-in-law undertook the task
of nursing me back to health. I was given chicken-broth, liver
soup, eggnog and rice mixed with fried garlic. In the mornings
a maidservant named Unnimayamma rubbed scented oils and a
paste of turmeric on my body and after half an hour, washed
the stuff off with water reddened with Thetchi leaves. My colour
reddened and my body grew plump with her administrations.
But I could not abandon the habit of staring at the spots on the
walls.

On my return to Bombay I found my unease growing. I
wished to escape from my home and walk on and on until at
last my feet reached the end of the world. I did not think
then that such a traveller would only reach ultimately his
starting place and that our ends, our real destinations, are our
beginnings.

One’s real world is not what is outside him. It is the
immeasurable world inside him that is real. Only the one who
has decided to travel inwards, will realize that his route has no
end. But at twenty, I was ignorant of these facts. So I went
through the red ribbon of road that led to the deserted seashore
of Danda. I sat on the folded nets of the fishermen and stared
at the sea, but its turbulence only aggravated my restlessness.

My husband was advised to call in a psychiatrist. I had
begun to shed my clothes regarding them as traps. My old ayah
wept guilty tears whenever she saw me in this demented condi-
tion. One day the psychiatrist arrived. I had painted two
pictures that very week and they showed demons mating with
snakes. He examined my pictures before examining me. He
read the poems I had composed for my personal diary. He
prescribed bromides for me and left the house. She needs rest,
he said, and lots and lots of sleep...

After a day or two, my husband took me to Lonavala for
a change. There was a heavy and freezing rain, drenching the
little hotel we stayed in. My husband dressed me in his woollen
trousers and a blue sweater. He fed me hot chicken soup. For
hours I lay with my head against his chest, listening to the
unpredictable rhythm of the monsoon.

27

For the first time in my life I learned to
surrender totally

Madness is a country

Just around the corner

Whose shores are never lit

But if you go there

Ferried by despair

The sentries would ask you to strip

At first the clothes, then the flesh

And later of course your bones

Their only rule is freedom

Why, they even eat bits of your soul

When in hunger.

But when you reach that shore
That unlit shore

Do not return, please do not return....

During my nervous breakdown there developed between
myself and my husband an intimacy that was purely physical.
It started at the Central Hotel in Lonavala. I was put on
bromides, and like the mist floating over hill-stations in the
mornings there was a murkiness veiling my consciousness. My
senses were like lotuses that folded themselves into tight buds
at sunset -hour. The contours of my world had gradually blur-
red.

After bathing me in warm water and dressing me in men’s
clothes, my husband bade me sit on his lap, fondling me and
calling me his little darling boy. I accepted with gratitude his

100

MY STORY

tenderness which was but lust, loud and savage, for it seemed
like a good substitute for love. I was by nature shy.

Whenever he tried to strip me of my clothes, my shyness
clung to me like a second skin and made my movements grace-
less. Each pore of my skin became at that moment a seeing
eye, an eye that viewed my body with distaste. But during my
illness, I shed my shyness and for the first time in my life
learned to surrender totally in bed with my pride intact and
blazing.

But this idyll was shortlived. I was taken away to Malabar
and put in charge of an Ayurvedic physician who prescribed
cooling lotions for my head. I stayed not at Nalapat but at
Sarvodaya, the modern bungalow of my parents and spent all
my walking hours with my friends who were unmarried and
carefree. One day my grandmother requested me to spend a
night at the old house with her.

We shall talk far into the night, she said, it will be like old

times She kept a lighted lamp on the window-sill and waited

for me to go there after my dinner. The night was windy and
my father did not let me leave the house. The Nalapat house
was four hundred years old. Its rafters used to tremble in the
wind. I do not want you to spend a night in that ramshackle
house, said my father.

At four in the morning I woke up and went up to the
verandah to look out. The winds had died down but the lamp
was still burning on the window-sill. It symbolized for me the
loneliness of old age. My grandmother did not talk about her
disappointment. She had perhaps realized that the grand-
child who had once lain against her body at night to fall sleep
had grown out of the need for the kind of love that only the
old could give.

Tragedy is not death but growth and the growing out of
needs. I had become to her a stranger, a young woman who
had secrets tucked away in her heart, but when after total re-
covery, I climbed into the car which was to take me to the
railway station, my grandmother approached me with reddened
eyes and asked, you will come for VISHU (the Kerala new

JCAMALA DAS

101

y^ar) in April, won’t you... and, being a practised teller of white
lies, I held her rough hands in mine and murmured, yes, of
course, of course....

Before the second week of April she passed away. She
was orthodox and very puritanical. I did not wish ever to
cause her unhappiness by my unconventional way of thinking.
So when I heard that she had died, a part of me rejoiced at my
new-found freedom, while another felt only a deep desolation.

None had loved me as deeply as my grandmother. But
within a week after her death, I fell in love with an extremely
handsome young man who walked with me from the Khar
gymkhana where I had gone in the evening to play tennis.
The evening’s sun lit up his grey eyes. The gloss of his skin
and the beauty of his smile made me feel all of a sudden so
awestruck, so humble —

We moved to a cottage near the sea facing the Cuffe Parade
in the gaudy month of June when the trees were all in bloom
and the yellow butter flies were all over the tiny lawn. Behind
the two cottages which were identical was a six-storeyed build-
ing called the Dhunastra which was old and vacant. The whole
estate belonged to the Reserve Bank of India who were my
husband’s employers. It stretched from the crowded Wodehouse
Road to the lonely Cuffe Parade, beyond which in those days
lay marshy land and the gurgling sea. There was a dirt road
that led up to the sea but we seldom went near its turbulence,
fearing the harsh winds that rose from it at high tide.

Our new home had a porch screened off with creepers, a
drawing room full of books and two bedrooms. From my bed-
room I could hear the iron gate open and the gravel grate under
the feet of visitors who came to see us. We had few friends.
There were camelias growing under my window. From my bed
I could watch my children play on the lawn chasing butterflies.

My days were filled with incredible sweetness. On the
porch the Rangoon creepers bloomed, the tender pinks looking
white in the evening’s shadows. I hung a brass lamp M
porch and lit it every evening.

102

MY STORY

One evening when I was seated on the top step of the porch,
the grey-eyed friend came to sit at my feet. His lips had a
tremor which delighted me. I hope you are not falling in love
with me, I said, smiling down at him. He hid his face in the
folds of my sari. Outside my sons were playing with the neigh-
bour’s children. Inside otu drawing room my husband was
working on his files....

Soon after our house-move, my son Monoo was stricken
with polio and had to be taken to Dr. Patel’s polyclinic at Vile
Parle for treatment. I was tense with anxiety. Hot fomenta-
tions were given to the child, who began to improve gradually
but the shuttling between Colaba and Vile Parle tired me out
and ruined my looks. I burst into tears frequently for no
reason at all.

Six-year-old Monoo asked me, why do you cry, Amma, am
I going to die and, I embraced him shaking my head vehemently
saying no, no, no. One day my handsome friend visited us at
the hospital. My son was lying asleep. I could not talk. All
I could do was cry. He held me close to his chest and kissed
my wet eyes. Amy, I love you, he said, everything will be all
right, my darling....

Who was he to me ? During that summer while the Gul-
mohurs burnt the edges of the sky, he dressed my hair with
scented white flowers plucking them from beneath my window.
What did he want from me ? Once or twice standing near him
with his arms around my shoulders I whispered, I am yours,
do with me as you will, make love to me.... but he said, no, in
my eyes you are a goddess, I shall not dishonour your body....

Today at Nariman Point the tall buildings crowd one an-
other. But when I was young and in love with a grey-eyed
man it was a marshy waste. We used to walk aimlessly along
the quiet Panday Road or cross the CuSe Parade to walk to-
wards the sun. We did not have a place to rest. But in the
glow of those evening suns, we felt that we were Gods who
had lost their way and had strayed into an unkind planet....

28

My love was like alms looking for a
begging bowl

Pigeons on the ledge
Of an afternoon dream
Sit strangely silent
The hot dust rises
Falls on sun-peeled beaks
On a city of fevered
Lanes.

The sun swells; then
Swollen like a fruit
It runs harsh silver threads
Lengthwise my afternoon
Dream.

The old building that hid the crowded Wodehouse Road
from our view was called DHUNASTRA and was one that
was condemned by the Municipality.

Its wails had deep cracks through which pale shoots of the
peepul emerged during the rainy months. Its closed window-
panes resembled eyes filmed over by cataract whenever the sun
lit them up. On the ledges strutted pigeons who bruised my
siesta with their moody whimpers.

On some afternoons feeling restless I used to walk up to
the old house, with the red gravel crunching under my sandals
and go up the broken staircase that was the crooked spinal
cord of the building. I opened several doors to stare at the
darkness within and always, always, there were the invisible

104

MY STORY

rodents scuttling about and the dust rising from the crevices
on the floor.

I liked to imagine that Dhunastra was a demon’s palace and
that at night-time the residents emerged into our familiar di-
mension to sing and dance. I used to tell such stories to my
children and half believe in the imaginary beings myself.

Had I not heard often on moonlit nights the jingle of anklets
and the silvery laughter of celestial revellers rising out of the
old Dhunastra, when even the street outside was silent and no
car moved or honked nearing the petrol station nearby

I yearned for adventure, I wanted to fling myself into
danger. Once standing in the darkened doorway of a room I
heard male voices speaking Konkani and saw the blurred out-
lines of a cauldron and some metal pipes and heard the hiss of
steam.

One of the men, a gold-toothed one, turned round and
caught sight of me. Delicious moment of uncertainty ! Were
they going to kill me ? In another moment I was gone running
down the stairs with my heart thumping loudly in my chest.

Later, our milkman told me that the bootleggers were
making use of the deserted house for their activities and that
I ought not to go there at all. They are killers, he said.

My friend sent me- from Delhi a letter that was so silly that
it nearly disgusted me. It had fallen into the hands of my
husband who read it out aloud to watch my reaction. If you
wish to know how much I love you, the young man had written,
count the stars in the sky. I blushed with embarrassment for
him.

My husband was irked. Amy, I thought you were an intel-
ligent girl. What on earth could have made you encourage
such a stupid fellow ? I could not tell him of the other’s grey
eyes where on afternoons I had seen the sun fall like honey or
of his pretty smile or of his dimpled cheeks. My husband
removed his glasses to spare me further embarrassment.

Behind that one question of his, lurked all the unasked ones,
like invisible arrows waiting to wound me. Don’t I feed you,

KAMALA DAS

105

clothe you and provide warm shelter ? Don’t I discharge the
connubial responsibilities competently whether you ask for
love or not....

My friend, when told of this incident, took leave of me with
alacrity. I was a vessel overflowing with emotions. Therefore
at that moment watching his back and his brisk walk I could
only regard him as a coward. The only truth that mattered
was that I had all that love to be given away.

Like alms looking for a begging bowl was my love which
only sought for it a receptacle. At the hour of worship even
a stone becomes an idol. I was perhaps seeking a familiar
face that blossomed like a blue lotus in the waters of my dreams.
It was to get closer to that bodyless one that I approached other
forms and lost my way. I may have gone astray, but not once
did I forget my destination....

Recently our family friend Ram Deshmukh told me of a
tree in the university garden, which one morning sprouted
blossoms heavy with scent. He had gone there for his morning
walk and had stood still for a long while watching the bees
crowding the flowers and listening to their hum. He said that
it was so much like a carnival. But spring’s festivals are so
brief.

When he returned to the spot the next morning there were
neither the flowens nor the eager bees. The tree stood lonely
as before and underneath, on the ground, lay the dead flowers.
Deshmukh had felt distressed.

When he told me this story I felt that I was going to burst
into tears as beauty seemed to be only a brief season : Yes, I
felt that I was that tree for a short while and that on the porch
of our cottage facing the Cuffe Parade I had once shone briefly
with the bloom of spring. But too soon the autumn had
arrived. Too soon the bees had moved away.

One day when I opened the door, there stood like a short-
statured God, a stranger dressed in off-white linen and wearing
a flat Italian collar. I am Carlo he said. I am your pen-
friend....

I had stopped writing to all my friends after marriage and

106

MY STORY

SO felt greatly surprised to see him. He had glossy straight
hair and thick red lips. His hooded eyes gave him enormous
sex appeal but I did not feel attracted to him physically. He
kissed my right cheek, holding with one hand my loose hair.

Tidy up your curly hair, he cried, let me see your face
clearly. When we went inside, hand in hand, my maidservant
gave us a haughty glance. She distrusted all foreigners. Once
when she had watched Nikita Khrushchev drive past our gate,
she had nodded her head amiably and remarked, he does not
look like a foreigner, he looks very elegant. Who will say by
looking at him that he is not a Nair ? —

When Carlo came into my life all the flowers of the uni*
versity garden had fallen. I was not a misty-eyed girl in love
with love.

29

I still yearned for my grey-eyed friend

It was July, a July full of rain, and darkness
Trapped like smoke in the hollows of the sky, and
That lewd, steamy smell of rot rising out of earth-
He walked one step ahead of me, the west wind leaking
Through his hair, and I thought, if I could only want.
Really, really want his love, I shall ride happiness.
Great white steed, trampler of unsacred laws.

If I could only dislodge the inherited
Memory of a touch, I shall serve myself in
Bedroom mirrors, dark fruit on silver platter.

While he lies watching, fair conqueror of another’s
Country. I shall polish the panes of his moody eyes,
And in jealous moods, after bitter words and rage
I shall wail in his nerves, as homeless cats wail
From the rubble of a storm....

Carlo was the only son of wealthy parents but I was the
wife of a Government employee who struggled with the unpaid
bills at the beginning of every month.

He was urbane and sophisticated. The little village called
Punnayurkulam which I had left behind clung to me like dirt
under my finger nails. I was steeped in folk lore and supersti-
tion. I wore around my neck a black thread strung through a
talisman made for propitiating the angry Gods. I had four
sarees in all and a couple of cotton blouses which I prettied up
with embroidery.

At the big hotels where Carlo took me for lunch, I had
trouble handling the cutlery. There was nothing that I could

108

MY STORY

do without a measure of awkwardness, but Carlo said, holding
nay hand tightly in his, please don’t change, please don’t change
into a Bombay-bitch.

One day, while we were walking towards the Strand Book
Shop he told me that we had common foster parents. Had we
not grown up listening to the firm voices of Chekov, Flaubert,
Maeterlink, Mansfield and Virginia Woolf? The sounds that
our real parents made in our presence had been so indistinct
while the dead ones filled our ears with their philosophy. Isabella
Duncan told us that love was best when free. We looked at
each other in nervousness. Could we follow her example ? Then
I blushed purple. You can marry me, said Carlo. You can
forget your grey-eyed friend, leave your indififerent husband and
come with me to my country.

We can probably have a love affair, I said, remembering the
peace of my nights and the faces of my little sons closed in
sleep. lam not the divorcing kind.... And I am not Vronsky,
said Carlo, laughing.

I used to enjoy crossing the Wodehouse Road to walk past
the shops, and, seeing me always in my brown khaddar saree,
the shop-men and the drivers loitering around mistook me for
a comely ‘ayah’ and whistled at me. My children looked too
fine to be mine, whenever they walked with me, holding my
hand with their podgy fingers.

Beginning from the left there was the shop called the Pierot-
tis where John sold us eclairs and watched us eat them, leaning
against the counter. Then there was Mr. Shroff’s Radio shop
where we stepped in just for a minute to say hello and then
there was our dear Doctor’s dispensary with the young com-
pounder perched on a high stool looking out, and after that there
was for us a place to pause, the studio owned by handsome
Zafar, who photographed us often and talked about the girl
Naseera with whom he was in love.

Outside his studio were the couple who had married for
love out of caste and had become pavement dwellers, a thin
young man who made his living cleaning cars who was from
Madras and his fat Maharastrian bride. Diagonally across was

KAMAiA DAS

109

the children’s school, where my sons went to pick up their edu-
cation most reluctantly every morning.

Near it, was the building where my father’s friend Varma
lived. When my father was visiting us Varma called us for tea
to his flat which was on the sixth floor and had a terrace with
granite ledges from which we admired the date-palms and the
blue strip of sea that enclosed the Colaba point.

Varma’s wife was handsome with long plaited hair and dark
eyes. It was on old and dingy-looking flat but her beauty com-
pensated for its drabness. She seemed to be in a bad temper
on the day of the tea-party. Obviously, she thought us boorish
and not quite her type.

In those days the fair-complexioned folks had some kind of
a superiority complex. The British had instilled in us certain
mistaken notions of beauty and refinement. It was considered
improper to wear colourful clothes for formal functions. The
accent was always on mousiness. Ladies of high society pre-
ferred to wear clothes of light-grey or olf-white, colours favoured
by the British. Flamboyance in apparel was regarded as being
crude.

But the lower middle classes had a whale of a time dressing
up their women in dark reds and dark greens so that they
sparkled like gems in the afternoon sun. The women-labourers
too wore dark colours and when they carried flat basins of clay
or cement they swung their hips with pride and sang in Telugu.
Behind my cottage the old house was being taken down and
a new one was being made on its site.

For nearly a year our backyard was filled with wire nets
and gravel and the two machines from Millars which made a
loud crushing sound from ten to six. I enjoyed watching the
building up of that new Dhunastra, making friends with the
labourers and the overseers who came to us for a drink of
water, or for a betel leaf from the ayah’s box.

The builders were from the villages of Andhra Pradesh.
After six they were paid their wages by the overseer. Then the
ladies crowded round the hydrant to take their bath, laughing
loudly while their men watched them from a distance. Then the

110

MY STORY

women kneaded the dough and made thick chapatis which every-
body ate with crushed chillis and onions.

The children who were in the day so covered with dust that
they resembled dolls made out of straw and mud glistened like
blue beetles after their evening baths. They climbed onto their
mothers’ laps and sucked at the teats, although some of them
were as old as five or six. They slept in make-shift huts made
of corrugated iron on charpoys.

On Sundays the men drank country liquor and returned to
pick loud quarrels with their wives. Then we heard the
sounds of weeping and closed our windows to spare them any
embarrassment.

July slid by and August arrived, but I still yearned for my
grey-eyed friend. Am I ugly, I asked Carlo. No you are a
pretty girl but the fellow is a cad, he said. We walked along
the narrow dirt road leading to the sea and Carlo held me
close to him with an arm around my waist. What is my future,
he asked me. Have I a future at all ?

30

Sex and the co-operative movement

Of late I have begun to feel a hunger
To take in with greed, like a forest fire that
Consumes, and with each killing gains a wilder
Brighter charm, all that comes my way. Bald child in
Open pram, you think I only look, and you.

Too, slim lovers behind the tree and you, old
Man with paper in your hand and sunlight in
Your hair. My eyes lick at you like flames, my nerves
Consume; and when I finish with you, in the
Pram, near the tree, and on the park bench, I spit
Out small heaps of ash, nothing else. But in me
The sights and smells and sounds shall thrive and go on
And on and on. In me shall sleep the baby
That sat in prams, and sleep and wake and smile its
Toothless smile. In me shall walk the lovers, hand
In hand and in me, where else, the old shall sit
And feel the touch of sun. In me the street lamps
Shall glimmer, the cabaret girls cavort, the
Wedding drums resound, the eunuchs swirl coloured
Skirts and sing sad songs of love, the wounded moan.
And in me the dying mother with hopeful
Eye shall gaze around, seeking her child, now grown
And gone away to other towns, other arms. . .

In the year 1957, Cuffe Parade was a secluded street and all
its houses, the two-storeyed mellow ones with handsome columns.
Gothic arches and bay-windows, faced the sea and its marshy
border.

On the iron benches of the Esplanade, the aged inmates of the
Parsi sanatorium used to sit, still as statues, absorbing the sun.

112

MY STORY

The sanatorium was a charitable institution where the poor
could get a room for as little as five rupees per month. The ma-
jority of its inhabitants were old pensioners whose children, now
grown up, did not want them in their modern flats. Every old
face looked lonely to me. Often I sat near them, hoping that
they would begin to talk to me out of sheer loneliness, but none
spoke.

From its verandah the children quarrelled with their mothers
and asked for money to buy the cotton candy and the balloons
which the peddlers brought to the gate. Quite often there would
be loud outbursts from the harried mothers and a few slaps for
the children who set up a loud wail. The women wore white
frocks with tiny floral prints when they went out and carried
large string bags to bring back the groceries. All of them look-
ed anaemic and there was in their limbs a limpness that remind-
ed one of salamanders. I wrote several stories in Malayalam
about them, following each of them in my imagination to their
rooms hung with net curtains and old sepia tinted photo-
graphs.

When the “Mathrubhumi” published my stories, I began to
get letters from my readers in Bombay who expressed their ad-
miration. Each letter give me such a thrill. I had then evolved
a technique of following each of my characters for the duration
of an hour and writing down his or her thoughts. I liked to
study people, for I loved them tremendously.

Often my husband would tell our doctor who was a Parsi
that I was writing too many stories about his community and
laughing. Dr. Masani would warn me that the Parsi Panchayat
would soon hear of it and take me to task. How little he knew
of the tenderness with which I approached each of my charac-
ters.

At about that time, my brother. Dr. Mohandas, decided to
marry a pretty relative of ours. Before I left alone to attend the
wedding, catching the plane to Cochin, I walked into the new
beauty parlour that had been opened by Dhun Bhilpodiwala to
see if they could do something to heal my pimples. There was
a foreigner, possibly a Pole, named Val who steamed my face
and squeezed out the pimples. Then she bleached my face and

KAMALA DAS

113

sent me up to the loft where a young lady called Miss Master
sat waiting to trim my hair. I was astonished at the change in
my looks and to go with the new look, I bought a blue silk
saree with a red and gold border.

How proudly I walked towards the plane, while my hair
swung this way, that way, and the down on my upper lip, bleach-
ed by peroxide, gleaming gold in the morning sun. As luck
would have it, I sat next to a gentleman who was reading a
poem written by me and published in the Illustrated Weekly of
India. When in the course of conversation I told him that I
was the K. Das who had written the poem, he was so delighted
that he offered me as a gift a typewriter which graciously, but
reluctantly, I refused to accept. You are a stranger, I told
him. But every friend was once a stranger, he said, displaying
a smile shabbied by yellow, uneven teeth.

A day after my brother’s wedding, I returned to Bombay. It
was raining hard and the time was late at night. My husband
had not come to the airport to receive me. I felt lost and un-
wanted. But I spotted a lady who had been a friend of my
family in Calcutta and got her to reach me home in her car.
When I went into my house, my children were fast asleep and
my husband lazily told me that I was late.

Why didn’t you come to the airport, I asked him. Don't
you love me at all ? I sobbed holding him close to me. He said
I am tired and sleepy, we shall talk in the morning tomorrow....

In the same year, my son Monoo fell ill with pleurisy. He
started to spit toflfee-coloured phlegm which I collected in tow-
els and later washed out by dipping them in hot water. It
was sticky like chewed gum. Our doctor gave him injections of
Streptomycine every day. The cough seemed endless. Even
while he slept peacefully, it seemed to me that I was hearing it.

Often at night he would wake out of sleep, leaping up, un-
able to breathe while his face turned ashen and his eyes widened
in fear. But I walked up to the Colaba book stores every even-
ing to get him comics, so that he would not mind so much the
discomforts of his illness. We had an oxygen cylinder ready at
his beside which I operated each time he got an attack of dis-

114

MY STORY

noea. When the attack would subside, he would turn to me
and embrace me* Am I going to die, Amma, he would ask me,
and I would hold him tight and say, shaking my head, no no
no....

When Monoo recovered, my thoughts again turned to love,
art and literature. I read profusely, lying unbathed in the morn-
ing with my face greasy and my hair done in two tight plaits.
It was only in the evening that I bothered to pretty myself up
a little, I was fond of oil-baths, but too lazy to bathe myself.
Often, I would make the old woman rub my body with Ayurve-
dic oils while I sat calmly on the bathroom’s wooden seat read-
ing a novel. My children loved to watch me take such baths.

My favourite oil was the Dinesavalyadi which I used to get
by post from the famous Arya Vaidyasala at Kottakkel. My
husband thought that it had the sexiest scent of all. He was
obsessed with sex. If it was not sex, it was the Co-operative
Movement in India, and both these bored me. But I endured

both, knowing that there was no escape from either. I even
learnt to pretend an interest that I never once really felt.

As my boss says, said my husband one day, the Co-operative
Movement has failed, but the Co-operative Movement must suc-
ceed. I thought that I would burst out laughing. Who is your

boss, I asked him. It is Venkatappiah, formerty of the I.C.S.
Have you not heard of him ?

My husband was furious. He felt that I was not up-to-date
with the happenings in the field of co-operation. You have not
once touched the prestigious report of the Rural Credit Survey
Committee, he said. But I let you make love to me every night,
I said, isn’t that good enough ?

31

He walked in silence a few yards ahead of me...

There was a time when our lusts were
Like multicoloured flags of no
Particular country. We lay
On bed, glassy-eyed, fatigued, just
The toys dead children leave behind.
And, we asked each other, what is
The use, what is the bloody use ?

That was the only kind of love.

This hacking at each other’s parts
Like convicts hacking, breaking clods
At noon. We were earth under hot
Sun. There was a burning in our
Veins and the cool mountain nights did
Nothing to lessen heat. When he
And I were one, we were neither
Male nor female. There were no more
Words left, all words lay imprisoned
In the ageing arms of night. In
Darkness we grew, as in silence
We sang, each note rising out of
Sea, out of wind, out of earth and
Out of each sad night like an ache....

In the off-season of November when guests were few and
the hotel-rates low, my husband took me and the little boys
to Panchgani for a holiday and settled us in a hotel named
Prospect.

It was a rambling bungalow with faded prints of stallions
and little men in riding habits sporting menacing moustaches,

116

MY STORY

all hanging slightly askew from the dingy walls of its lounge.

It was situated on the very top of a hill, and while we drove
up in a taxi, going round and round along the narrow red road
that hugged the mountain range, we heard the sound of children’s
laughter rising from the valley and saw the red berries in the
thickets glow like rubies in the evening sun. Tall grey birches
lined the walls of the hotel, trees with a chalky white bark peel-
ing in layers and triangular, notched leaves, and to the left lay
the woods, dark, unexplored and waiting for us with its strange
-aroma. There was gravel in the courtyard.

We were given two rooms, a large bathroom with a leaking
faucet and a verandah where we sat on cane chairs and drank
our first cup of tea. The children ate buttered toast and Bri-
tannia biscuits. The sounds from the valley were carried up to
our verandah each time a breeze blew. We heard the bells of the
ox cart and the clatter of their wheels.

It is too late to go down to the valley today, my husband
said, I am tired and very very hungry. The hotel-boys brought
us an early dinner, a brown unidentifiable soup, mutton stew,
cutlets and apricot curry. We carried the childrens’ beds into
our room and slept soundly under the red blankets the hotel had
lent us. At night, just before I drifted into deep sleep, I thought
I heard the hoot of a screech owl and the deep sough of the
wind trapped in the woods.

In the morning, one of the hotel boys woke us by knocking
on our door and then we found the mountain dawn, wrapped
in the gauze of mist, a delight. After breakfast we dressed in
thick woollens and went down to see the bazar which was at the
base. The children trotted on ponies while we walked behind
them. I could never keep pace with my husband who did not
pause to pick ferns, to smell them, or the berries, to take a tiny
tentative bite as I did. So he walked in silence a few yards
ahead of me. The market was lined with shops and sold walking
sticks made out of the blond wood of the birch and with
handles shaped to look like dogs’ heads, and salad bowls with
spoons.

A shoemaker named Salunke followed us back to the hotel

KAMALA DAS

117

where he measured the feet of our children to make for them
shoes of the Sambar leather, softer than even suede and mus-
tard-coloured. Tattooed women came to the hotel bearing flat
baskets filled with fresh raspberries laid out on their beds of
moss. They had discoloured teeth which they revealed to us
when they smiled, after we had lost in the bargaining.

In the afternoon, everybody including the servants of the
hotel had a short siesta, and I picked this hour to walk to the
woods where, besides the flowers I knew and recognised, the
wild cyclamen, the pickerels, the mountain laurels, the narcissus
and the exotic rayed lycoris, grew large unfamiliars, savage
ones that smelt of slaughter houses and of blood, which I picked
in bunches to tie upside down in a dark cupboard for drying
(when we packed up to leave after a month, the flowers were
dry and held their bright colours intact). From every tree, the
squirrels and the humming birds made soft utterances and the
woodcock stirred in the undergrowth while I walked through
the fallen leaves.

When I returned to the hotel, I wrote a letter inviting my
sons, Monoo and Chinnen, to a tea party that was to take place
on Saturday under the largest tree near the hotel’s wall. I
signed my name as Squirrel, and immediately posted it. When
my children received the letter, they clapped their hands in joy.
When Saturday came, I put them to sleep after their lunch and
arranged under the tree, paper plates full of pastry and almonds.
At four, I woke up the boys and dressed them in their red
cardigans and took them for the party.

They looked about for their hosts who was nowhere to be
seen. Perhaps they don’t trust you, I said. The cakes were
good and the nuts too. But Monoo was a little disappointed.
You must teach me the bird language and the squirrel language
in a hurry, Amma, he said. My sons then used to believe that
I could converse well with birds and animals. Even my husband
behaved occasionally as if he believed in my ability to com-
municate with the animals. Whenever a stray dog came near
us wagging its tail, he used to say to me, Amy, please ask this
friend of yours to move away, you know I can’t stand dogs....

118

MY STORY

The walls of the hotel had a mysterious dampness which
was caused probably by the many slugs that crawled slowly,
very slowly, up and down with only their little horns visibly
moving. They were big and muddy yellow. After seeing them
I could never tackle the brown soup that always preceded the
dinner. The soup was delicious and my husband thought me
silly to have suspected any connection between its mysteriousness
and the presence of the slugs.

During that time my menstrual periods bad become irregular
and painful. This prevented me from going down to the valley
every day with my family. So I sat on the front steps of the
hotel, my legs dangling while my eyes roved around, taking in
all the splen&urs of Panchgani.

There wa^ in one of the back rooms, a young man who had
come there with an attendant for a rest cure after a serious
nervous breakdown. He came to me one evening while I was
alone and asked me if I would please clip his nails for him. If
they are not cut short, I might scratch people, he said. I brought
out my pair of scissors and trimmed his nails for him. He
folded his hands in a salute and walked away.

In yet another room, there was an old man of 94 who had
completely lost his memory. His sons were in Singapore doing
some business and busy making their fortune. They had brought
him to the hotel for safekeeping and had, for the benefit of
others, left a noticeboard hanging on the door which gave typed
details of the old one’s bio-data, his post ofOLce, his illnesses, his
nearest relative’s address and of course, his full name. A hotel
boy was assigned to look after his needs, but he was all the
time left alone, propped up with cushions on a capacious arm
chair, where he sat peering at the birches with his bleary eyes.

Some evenings when I found myself alone, I walked up to
sit near him and to hold his mottled hand in mine. His hand
lay like a dead weight in mine. He was entirely mindless, like
a megatherium or some such extinct creature. It was obvious
that he could not communicate with the world outside the dark
and vaporous prison of his mind. One day I gave him a choco-
late but his great fingers crumpled it and threw it away, while
his Nepali attendant guflfawed at my foolishness.

KAMALA DAS

119

When we finally left the hotel, we carried dried forest flowers
and a pair of sambar shoes for my father, which were later
found to be too tight for his feet. The shoemaker had given
us his address written in Hindi on a notepaper, but it was
mislaid and so none of our friends in Bombay could order from
Salunke his beautiful sambar shoes.

After our Panchgani holiday, we still had about a fortnight’s
leave and so we went to our house in Malabar to stay with my
parents. They were happy to see us looking bronzed with the
mountain sun My father had then made an arch with bamboos
which was wrapped totally in purple bougainvillae. It led to
his cherished garden where the marigolds, the sweet peas and
the alamandas were all in blood. Even the hedges held out
great clusters of flowers, for it was the month of December, the
time of Thiruvathira, the water-festival which the virgins and
the married women celebrated by plunging into the cold ponds
two hours before the dawn, to splash about and sing.

The chill of the water would cling to their voices, sweetening
the already sweet, so that the men rose from their sleep with
delicious thoughts of amour. After the bath and the water-
games, the women sat around bonfires blackening their eyes
with collyrium and decorating their brow with sandal paste and
a dot of black “Chanthu”, made out of burnt rice. Then they
swung on the long bamboo swings tied from all trees to warm
themselves and went home to eat a breakfast of arrowroot
pudding, banana and tender coconuts.

The observation of Thiruvathira was expected to make wo-
men more beautiful. This was a festival dedicated to the
worship of Kamadeva, the God of sensual love.

32

It was the beginning of delightful death

When I

Sleep, the outside
World crumbles, all contacts
Broken. So in that longer sleep
Only

The world
Shall die, and I
Remain, just being
Also being a remaining....

After my return from home I slipped into a phase of poor
health and like a hibiscus shedding its dark petals my poor
body shed red clots on the bathroom floor, and no amount of
rest did it any good.

So my husband called in a lady doctor to examine me,
and because I liked her smile, immediately I put aside my shy-
ness and stripped before her. She took me to Dr. Shirodkar’s
for a minor operation and later to her own nursing home at
Matunga for recuperation.

It was a small place with only three rooms, a verandah and
a hall where the labour usually took place. The doctor whose
name was Pankajam Karunakaran stayed on the first floor at
night, driving over to her palatial bungalow at Andheri only on
Sundays. She had an able assistant named Shantabai and a
few young nurses to help her in the delivery of babies.

KAMALA DAS

121

I was given the best room, the one below the staircase, and
one or two of our friends sent me flowers which made its win-
dow-sills attractive. I could watch the quiet road beyond the
wall from my bed.

A day after the operation I felt a sudden warmth between
my legs and found to my horror that it was the beginning of a
haemorrhage. The nurses, woken from their sleep, tried to stem
the flow but it went on and until in desperation one of them
rushed up to call the doctor.

I could hear a kind of silence trilling in both my ears and
feel my body grow lighter. At one moment I felt that I was
flying about in the room like a chiffon scarf and hovering over the
inert body on the bed from which flowed the river of blood. It
was the beginning of delightful death which removes, before
it stabilizes itself, all anxieties connected with this world.

When the doctor came and gave me the emergency treat-
ment I heard her voice as though from a distance and wanted to
tell her that everything was going to be all right for me and that
I was happy to have reached that stage, but I could not make
my lips move or open my eyes. I discovered then that death
was the closing of the lotus at dusk and probably temporary.
But her ministrations worked and I returned to life while my
body that had chilled warmed with her touch and my ears filled
themselves with her gentle voice telling me that I was saved.

If death had been offered as a gift she had knocked that
gift away, but I felt only a new love for her. I stroked her hair
and kissed her checks while she laughed in relief. I was looking
at her as if I were seeing her for the first time. What is it, Amy,
she asked me, why do you stare at me like this?...

She was the kindest woman I had ever known. Her patients
adored her and when I was well enough to walk about I sat
near the hall- window watching the poor patients queueing up
with their babies on their hips and the medicine-bottles in their
hands. She did not take money from the poor but made them
feel that the gratuity was only due to friendship- Every patient
felt that she was somebody special.

She was always dressed in pale Kanjivarams and had her

122

MY STORY

hair tidied into a bun. Occasionally I ran into her clinic and
kissed her, smelling the fragrance of her face powder. It was
not with happiness that I left her nursing home but the children
were happy to get me back for the nightly story-tellings and for
the silly games on the lawn.

Then, by and by, my health became almost perfect. The
pimples vanished as suddenly as they had arrived. I kept telling
my husband that I was in love with the doctor and he said, it is
all right, she is a woman, she will not exploit you....

I wrote several stories in Malayalam about the people I met
at her nursing home. Whenever a story appeared in a journal
I ran with it to my bedroom to lie down and read it, for my
heart used to thump so with excitement to see my name in print.
I used to publish poems in the Illustrated Weekly but under
the name K. Das because I suspected the editor to be prejudiced
against women writers. He was an Irishman named Sean Man-
dy. He was a considerate editor and whenever he rejected a
poem he sent me the reasons for the rejection. I used to day-
dream of meeting him some day at the Gul Mohur where he
was supposed to lunch every day. After the meeting he would
inevitably fall in love with me....

If he had invited me for lunch then I would have found it
difficult to accept his invitation because I spent whatever money
I got from the Malayalam journals on buying books from the
Strand Book Stall and bought no new clothes at all. In dress I
was as shabby as a tramp. I had only one or two pink blouses
sewn at home which had tears under the armpit. My sarees
were patched up in places, clumsily. I was not exactly the kind
of girl who would have decorated the Gul Mohur at lunch-
time.

Writing became my only hobby. I wrote almost two stories
every week and mailed them, borrowing the money for stamps
from my husband. The Mathrubhumi sent me twelve
rupees per story. Each story took me one fuU night to finish,
for it was not possible to write when the children were awake.

I would put the finishing touches to a story at about six
when the family rose from their sleep. I tried to sleep for an

KAMALA DAS

123

hour or two in the afternoons but the neighbours were friendly
ladies who liked to visit my house to chat about clothes, and I
found the going rather tough.

In the mornings when the boys were away at school I paint-
ted in oils on an easel set up on the portico. I could only paint
women but this I could do well. I used to give my paintings
to my friends on their birthdays. Abstract art had not become
very fashionable in those days. My friends therefore gladly
hung the pictures on their drawing-room walls.

It was a good phase in my life. I had health, looks, books
to read and talent. Early in the morning the Gorkha watch-
man of the building called the ‘Gulistan’ would wake me from
sleep with his meandering song. The Nepali tunes brought with
them the mistiness of the mountains and their tragic loneliness.
The Gorkha bathed under a faucet while he sang, and we heard
the water and the song together, entwined, while we lay on our
beds reluctant to rise and the sky slowly paled outside our
window.

33

Passing away of my great grandmother

There is a house now far away where once
I received love* That woman died.

The house withdrew into silence, snakes moved

Among books I was then too young

To read, and my blood turned like the moon*

How often I think of going

There, to peer through blind eyes of windows or

Just listen to the frozen air.

Or in wild despair, pick an armful of
Darkness to bring it here to lie
Behind my bedroom door like a brooding
Dog. You cannot believe, darling,

Can you, that I lived in such a house and
Was proud and loved, I who have lost
My way and beg now at strangers* doors to
Receive love at least in small change ?

After the sudden death of my granduncle and then that of
my dear grandmother the old Nalapat House was locked up
and its servants disbanded. The windows were shut, gently as
the eyes of the dead are shut.

My parents took my great grandmother to the house called
Sarvodaya where she occupied noiselessly the eastern bedroom
on the ground floor, shaded by the tall mango trees through the
leaves of which was visible the old beloved house. The rats
ran across its darkened halls and the white ants raised on its
outer walls strange totems of burial.

My great grandmother had a child’s capacity to put away

kamala das

125

grief. The old house’s death did not trouble her for long.
When she was called up from sleep to attend on her dying
daughter she only prayed feebly and got ready for the purifica-
tion bath.

My great grandmother was the only daughter of a wealthy
chieftain, the Raja of Punnathore Kotta. She was the only
one in our family who went to a temple riding an elephant.
When a Nair girl menstruated for the first time she was made
to sit on a black rug covered with white mull for three days in
strict segregation. She was allowed to wear all the jewellery
she possessed and given a gleaming brass mirror to hold before
her face.

On the fourth day she was taken out of the house to walk
with others in a procession to a pond where amidst loud ulula-
tions and laughter she was given a ceremonial bath. Afterwards
the women blackened her eyes with collyrium, decorated her
brow with sandalwood paste, her cheeks with raw turmeric and
her lips with betel. A feast was given to all in the village where
the women danced the Kaikottikkali and the young men had a
chance to see the girl now turned eligible for marriage.

On the seventh day she was taken to a far away temple. My
great grandmother, attaining puberty at eleven, rode her father’s
elephant to the temple seated elegantly on the howdah wearing
the heavy Amadakkottam which covered the upper halves of
her delicate breasts, while her maids ran on ahead of her crying
out Ho Ho to warn the untouchable communities to steer clear
of her path.

Within a year she was married to the Raja of Chiralayman
who was stout and had heavy sensual lips. At nineteen she
suddenly became very frigid and came away to Nalapat House
carrying her little daughter with her, offering no explanation at
all. I have watched her so often scrubbing the soles of her
feet and cleaning her toenails meticulously twice and thrice each
day and I have then suspected that her over-developed sense of
hygiene had something to do with her separation from her
husband. She must have thought messy the discharge of her
marital obligations.

126

MY STORY

My great grandmother was obsessed with her own sense of
punctuality. At twelve, as our hall-clock chimed twelve times
she emerged from her room enquiring of her lunch. She ate
the blandest of food. Occasionally as a joke we set forward
the hands of the clock so that it chimed twelve when the real
time was only eleven, and the old lady used to come out de-
manding food, murmuring I am hungry. When we laughed at
her she joined in our laughter too, her laugh sounding lively as
a schoolgirl’s and entirely guileless. She gossipped with the
servants, asked them personal questions about their marriages
and was always so happy to settle their domestic squabbles.

When my father decided to leave for Calicut to be the full-
time editor of a newspaper, the old one posed a problem. She
wished to accompany my parents to the town. But my aunt
persuaded my mother to let hef carry the old lady to her own
house which was about a furlong away. My mother, always
mortally afraid of hurting the feelings of relatives allowed her
sister to do this. Great grandmother was deposited in a dark
room opposite the pantry where she lay curled up on a narrow
cot, silent and morose.

My uncle was a famed politician, a Congress M.L.A. who
entertained hugely every day and so the meals were delayed
afiFairs, consisting of curries reddened with chillies and fried fish,
chicken and biryani. Great grandmother being a vegetarian
felt nauseated by the kitchen-smells and gradually lost appetite,
and growing weaker day by day her silence thickened into that
impenetrable one of death. Years after her death my mother
told me that abandoning her old grandmother lay like a weight
on her conscience. I could have carried her with me to Calicut,
she said, but at that time I only thought of my sister’s feelings...
The old are destined to be dumped like unwanted luggage, bits
of unfashionable junk, and left to perish. How often I have re-
membered my sweet frail great grandmother and prayed to
God that I would not meet with her fate but die early while
wanted and cherished.

34

Again and again the same man phoned...

I take leave of you, fair city, while tears
Hide somewhere in my adult eyes
And sadness is silent as a stone
In the river’s unmoving
Core

It’s goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

To slender shapes behind windowpanes,

Shut against indiscriminate desire
And rain; to yellow moons.

So long ignored, so long unloved;

To the birds, flesh hungry.

Circling in the sky

With shrill and hostile cries; to the crowd.
Near the sea, walking or sitting
But always talking, talking,

Talking....

I take leave of you, fair city, keep your tears,
Your anger and your smiles for others.

Young, who come with unjaded eyes;

Give them your sad-eyed courtesans with tinsel
And jasmine in their hair, your marble
Slabs in morgues, your brittle
Roadside laughter....

It’s goodbye, goodbye, goodbye,

To the silence and the sounds.

To streets that I never walked

But in dreams, to lips that I never kissed

But in dreams, to children

Lovely as flowers, out of me

Never bom....

128

MY STORY

In the year 1962 there was a Seanza course for the Bankers
conducted in Bombay for which delegates from several coun-
tries had arrived. One of them who claimed to have some Span-
ish blood in his veins, visited our house regularly to eat the
evening meal with us.

He mixed shreds of an omelette with the rice, sprinkled sauce
and ate the mixture with gusto. He was of medium height, with
iron-grey hair that looked black when pomaded and eyes that
resembled currants which he winked wickedly at me.

One day while I sat at my desk complaining of a headache,
he began to massage the back of my neck with soft nimble fing-
ers until I felt the ache leave me and found myself falling asleep.
I am a hypnotist too, he said.

My husband thought him excellent company if he had a
stock of jokes and anecdotes which made us laugh uproariously.
Bring her a glass of water. Das, he said to my husband, and
when he was away, I was kissed gently on my cheeks. I rose
from the chair immediately. Don’t you love me at all he asked,
lowering his voice.

The three of us used to go to the old joint, Volga, to hear the
husky-voiced crooner and also to dance. Our foreign friend was
a graceful dancer and he did not want ever to sit out while a
dance was going on. I shall teach you, he said and together
we danced while my husband watched us sleepily from his table.
On some evenings, our friend bought up all the strings of jas-
mines that were on sale at Churchgate and decked my hair with
them. You are my bride, my sweet bride, he used to whisper
while decorating my hair.

My husband did not take these attentions seriously, for the
man was anyway old enough to be my father and I was not ex-
actly hard up for male attention.

There was Carlo, the dark-haired young man who stayed at a
city hotel, who loved me enough to want to marry me; there was
in another city, the one I was infatuated with, and of course at
home, there was my husband, passionate and eager as a lover.
I was like a poor girl who found herself rich all of a sudden.
I was drunk with power. I tried to alter my hairstyle, cut it

KAMALA DAS

129

shorter and with a fringe that covered all of my forehead. I
wore a black blouse with a white saree in the evenings. I was so
healthy that even my perspiration was musky.

We had then moved into the new Dhunastra, into a flat on
the fifth floor with a verandah that faced the yellow-painted
house of the Japanese Consul and his garden, with the four
large marble statues.

After my morning bath, I stood on the verandah enjoying
the rough winds whipping at my clothes. One day there was a
ring from our new phone and when I picked it up, an unfamiliar
voice said ; “I am XYZ. Good morning to you. I have been
watching you from far for the past few weeks, and I am in
love”.

I rang off in a hurry. I was panic-stricken. I ‘ walked up to
a mirror to have a long look at myself. Was I resembling a
harlot ? Did I look like an easy prey ? I told my husband
about the call and as usual, he shrugged it off as something
beneath his notice.

There was again and again the same man phoning from a
a public booth, the clank of the coin and then the Good morn-
ing to You. One day I put an end to this bother. I called him
over to my house, and he said apologetically that he was re-
minded of his wife whenever he looked at me and that I ought
to forgive him his audacity. Forgiving was s o very ea sy for a
girl as vain ^d happy I was in those da^I'

It was at this juncture in my life that my husband was trans-
ferred to Calcutta to serve a term of three years. This shattered
my calm, for I had to leave not only my younger brother who
was working for a postgraduate degree in Paediatrics, but also
the only friends who bothered to love me a little.

But my husband’s superior was adamant and off we want to
Calcutta, leaving my brother on the platform with tears falling
from his eyes and a kerchief fluttering from his hand, bravely
like a flag. While we were taking off, a cousin warned me to
be cautious in dealing with my husband’s relatives. They are
sly and furtive, they will only try to catch you tripping, he
said. Do not be frank and above all, do not be so damned
innocent....

35

Calcutta’s cocktail season

What is this drink but
The April sun, squeezed
Like an orange in
My glass ? I sip the
Fire, I drink and drink
Again, I am drunk,

Yes, but on the gold
Of suns. What noble
Venom now flows through
My veins and fills my
Mind with unhurried
Laughter? My worries
Doze. Wee bubbles ring
My glass, like a bride's
Nervous smile, and meet
My lips. Dear, forgive
This moment's lull in
Wanting you, the blur
In memory. How
Brief the term of my
Devotion, how brief
Your reign when I with
Glass in hand, drink, drink.
And drink again this
Juice of April suns...-

Calcutta is a playground for children between the ages of
twenty and eighty. Its winter is called the cocktail season.
The participants at such cocktails are normally the industrialists,
the smart executives of foreign firms and the Government ofl&ci-

KAMALA DAS

131

als who cannot afford to buy liquor and so must depend on
others for their quota of fun.

The Government servants drag their foolish wives to such
parties, hoping that their commonness and charm might impress
the rich. The rich enjoy being introduced to the Government-
wives, and to those who are still young and fresh, they hand
glasses of sherry or vermouth with crushed ice and plead in
sweet tones, please drink, please let me see the drink
put a sparkle in those lovely eyes of yours....

And after the fool has had a drink or two, the rich man
gets closer, overpowers the girl with the unfamiliar smell of
exotic shaving lotions, leers and whispers, how beautiful your
rosy cheeks are today, your beauty is a feast for ray starving eyes.

At that precise movement the lady will glance at her hus-
band. panic rising in her bosom. The spouse will be at the
other end of the hall, either engaged in the discussion of Japa-
nese Geisha-girls with industrialists who would have cautiously
left their wives at home or will be seated behind a large potted
palm, pouring out another whiskey into his glass.

The conspicuous greed for liquor and the indifference will
disgust the wife. She will begin to drink more and more not
because she likes it but only to spite him for having brought her
to the accursed party.

Finally, running unsteadily to the bathroom, she will get
sick bending over the washbasin and the host or some other
lustful man will appear at her side in a trice to rub her back
and help her tidy up her face. He will touch all the soft por-
tions of her body, accidentally. Her husband will be lying on
a sofa, passed out, after a dozen free drinks, dreaming alcoholic
dreams.

To raise him from the sofa and to take him home an army
will be required. Therefore giving up all hope, the girl will sit
somewhere, tears filling her eyes, while tender-hearted men paw
her and coo into her ears.

Such are the kind of games that are being played in Calcutta
during its winter. The players are practised liars. Lying will

132

MY STORY

come so naturally to them that most unwittingly they deceive
others. The newcomers of this society will be ridiculed and
laughed at. The ones who first embraced me with loving words
of welcome later spread unwholesome scandals about me. It
was from Calcutta that I lost my faith in the essential goodness
of human beings.

We had as a neighbour a kind-hearted gentleman who was
old and stout. My husband and I used to visit his house occa-
sionally and eat with him a delicious uppma made of beaten
rice and potato. We drank the sherbet made out of the Bhel-
fmit. We regarded him as an uncle. He tried to teach me
Sanskrit whenever I was willing to learn, but his pronunciation
always made me laugh.

When I fell ill with some kind of rheumatism he came to my
house, and massaged my bad leg, talking all the while about
his funny colleagues at office to make me laugh.

He did not call me by my real name. I was Gayatri to him.
He was interested in Hindu mythology and in the Upanishads.
When some of my husband’s relatives spread the rumour that
1 was having a love affair with the old one, I felt for him all of a
sudden the disgust I ought to have felt instead for the gossips.

I tried then to avoid meeting him. Whenever I saw him com-
ing toward my house I hid myself behind the bathroom door
and pretended to be away. One day he brought a garland of
marigolds and hung it over my self-portrait which was in my
drawing room. I went pale with anger. Why are you angry
with me, little one, he asked me. I did not reply. My husband
too was bothered about my sudden aversion towards the old
man. There is no logic in your attitudes, he said.

I dressed myself only in lungis and wore only black shirts
in those days. Lungis had not become fashionable then and so
the relatives and friends considered me a freak. I did nothing
to make my face pretty. We did not have enough money to
spend on good clothes anyway, and if at all some money came
my way I spent it all on books.

For parties I had three silk sarees which had been presented
to me at my wedding. I did not know then that I raised a

KAMALA DAS

133

laugh among the ladies whenever I attended a party wearing the
same old sarees, the two oranges and the one green.

Although there were tears in my sarees I had people to
crowd round me as listeners. I had a large fan-mail. There were
at least a dozen men deeply infatuated with me. And, yet I
feared Calcutta. I longed to escape from it.

In the summer of the first year, a visitor from Bombay cal-
led us for breakfast to his hotel-room. He was intelligent and
well-read. There was nothing I liked better than talking about
books, and so sitting near him, I was relaxed and happy when
suddenly his hand moved closer and closer to my thigh and
rested touching it lightly.

I thought that it was accidental. But his hand crept under
my thigh and became immobile. What was happening ? Although
I had had men falling in love with me, none of them had
shown sexual desire. I was loved as a young sister is loved.
This man’s movements surprised me. He cultivated the habit
of stroking my legs during conversation and caressing my long
hair. I nearly fell in love with him.

One day when he held me close and kissed me on my mouth
I stood acquiescent and after he released me, I asked him
are you in love with me, and he said, I like you.

When I told my husband about it, he warned me against
loving such a man. He is not capable of loving anyone except
himself, my husband said. You are always a child in my eyes,
Amy, he said, you may play around with love but be choosey
about your playmates. I do not want you ever to get hurt in
your life

36

I was Carious Sita

I am today a creature turned inside
Out. To spread myself across wide highways
Of your thoughts, stranger, like a loud poster
Was always my desire, but all I
Do is lurk in culs de sac.

Just two eyes showing.. *Oh never mind, I’ve
Spent long years trying to locate my mind
Beneath skin, beneath flesh and underneath
The bone. I’ve stretched my two-dimensional
Nudity on sheets of weeklies, monthlies.
Quarterlies, a sad sacrifice. I’ve put
My private voice away, adopted the
Typewriter’s click as my only speech; I
Click-click, click-click tiresomely into your
Ears, stranger, though you may have no need of
Me, I go on and on, not knowing why

My father has always been a teetotaller. He has often told
me that liquor should never be served in one’s house. All the
commandments engraved on the columns of my mind gradually
faded, the fierce winds rising out of the Ganges devoured their
words and I changed into a disobedient daughter.

Society can well ask me how I could become what I became,
although born to parents as high-principled as mine were. Ask
the books that I read why I changed. Ask the authors dead
and alive who communicated with me and gave me the courage
to be myself. The books like a mother-cow licked the calf of
my thought into shape and left me to lie at the altar of the world
as a sacrificial gift.

^mala das

135

There were then no pujas at my house. The sweet name of
God did not bloom ever on my tongue. My husbaml was nearly
all the time away touring in the outer districts. Even while he
was with me, we had no mental contact with each other. If at
all I began to talk of my unhappiness, he changed the topic im-
mediately and walked away.

One day when I could no longer bear my loneliness, I wrote
to Carlo asking him for advice. I do not wish to continue liv-
ing, I wrote. His reply did not come, although months passed.
I felt that even he had forgotten me, Carlo, who called me Sita
and treated me with awe as though I were a goddess. Perhaps
his marriage had changed him.

But one day in the morning, after my husband had left for
his office and the children had gone to their school, my servant
announced him in. There is a white man, come to see you, said
my cook. When I went into the dark drawing room, I found
Carlo seated on the old sofa wearing a blue shirt. The cook
was peering at us from behind the curtain and, as I was aware
of It, I showed little excitement. Carlo stood up and extended
his hand. Come to the verandah where we have an excellent
pingpong table, I said. We played an indifferent game for few
minutes. Then Carlo bade me sit near him on the wide ledge
of the verandah.

He had lost some of his weight and there was a new pallor
around his lips. You have grown fat and very dark. You
resemble a gypsy, said Carlo, laughing. What did you want me
to do, he asked me. I don’t know, I said....

That week, a famous novelist visiting India, arrived in Cal-
cutta and as he was related to my husband, a cousin arranged a
cocktail party for him on the lawn for which I had to go along.
The writer had spent the whole day with me, lunching and
drinking bottles of chilled beer and by evening I had a severe
headache, but I liked parties, especially those with writers strut-
ting around and I joined in, most happily, but there was a mis-
chievous cousin who coaxed me in affectionate tones to drink
more and more, so that I soon became quite drunk and dizzy.

And still the man kept telling me that he would feel insult-

136

MY STORY

ed if I refused the drink he himself had mixed for me. Sister-
in-law, you look lovely when you are drunk, he said and laugh-
ing a great deal, I gulped down another long drink. My eyes
burned like torches and like a fishing boat a laugh moved about,
drifting in the dusk of my veins. When I climbed into my car
finally taking leave of them all, what was left of my common-
sense told me that I ought not to return home to my children
looking like a tramp.

So I went to the hotel where Carlo was staying and in the
lift, seeing my red face glowmg like the red moon of an eclipse,
I felt frightened and unsteady but once inside Carlo’s room, he
carried me up to the bed and wiped my face with wet towels,
smelling of eau de cologne. What has happened to you, he
asked me, who has put you in this horrible state....

Oh Carlo, Oh Carlo, I am so miserable, I said and sobbed
aloud, holding tight his two hands in mine. Get up my darling,
he said, get up and tidy up your hair, I shall take you home.

Parting at the door, Carlo said, you pick up innocence as
you go along ... and then alone, seated on the verandah ledge,
unable to sleep and troubled with remorse and shame, I thought
of his words which seemed meaningless to me at that time. There
was not one star visible in the sky.

37

For the first time I saw the eunuchs dance
in Calcutta

He talks turning a sun-stained
Cheek to me, his mouth, a dark
Cavern, where stalactites of
Uneven teeth gleam, his right
Hand on my knee, while our minds
Are willed to race towards love;

But they only wander, tripping
Idly over puddles of
Desire.. .Can this man with
Nimble finger-tips unleash
Nothing more alive than the
Skin’s lazy hungers ? Who can
Help us who have lived so long
And have failed in love ? The heart,
An empty cistern, waiting
Through long hours, fills itself
With coiling snakes of silence.

I am a freak. It’s only
To save my face, I flaunt, at
Times, a grand, flamboyant lust.

In the year 1963 I won the P.E.N’s Asian Poetry Prize, and
had for the first time in my life a bank account of mine from
which in two days time I withdrew almost half the amount
for outfitting myself. I have always ignored the fashions, being
fully aware of their disability to help me look chic, but I have
wanted to dress aesthetically.

138

MY STORY

I grew fond of lungis with floral prints and shirts of black
poplin that concealed the heaviness of my upper torso. I lik-
ed strands of red beads and red glass bangles. I disliked the
foreign perfumes with their alcoholic base but liked to pour
attar in my bath-water. Instead of soap T used the powdered
bark of the Vaka tree which had an abrasive action on the
skin,

I had an oily skin which made me look younger than my
years. This endeared me to old men who were weary of sophis-
ticated ladies and the fragrances of their elaborate toilet. I was
drawn to old people, for they seemed harmless and they had
charm. They smelt clean. They knew how to put a girl at
ease just by paying her a simple compliment.

One of the old ones who used to visit our family on Sundays
had a face that resembled Stan Laurel’s, and I was very fond
of him. He made me laugh, clowning in our verandah, and
with mimicry that delighted my sons. He used to take us out
when my husband was out, touring, and get us ice-cream, cho-
colates and carry us to little restaurants, full of smoke and twi-
light.

We were grateful for the outings, for nobody else did bother
about us. My husband was too busy to think of taking us out
anywhere and he was not exactly rich either. This old man used
to plant kisses on my cheeks leaving us at the door; slobbering
kisses that had to be washed out in a hurry, and yet I was
guilty of encouraging him because I wanted someone to take my
little sons out and give them a good time. When he once brought
me a pornographic book wrapped in brown paper, I de-
cided to end the friendship. No reasons were given. He was
shrewd enough to guess them.

Then there were the men who were either connected with my
husband’s occupation or were at one time my father’s friends,
the ones I used to call “Uncle” from infancy, who had changed
to such an extent that they gave me lecherous hugs from behind
doors and leered at me while their wives were away. I hated
them. Often I told my husband that we ought to run away from
Calcutta and its corrupting atmosphere. But he paid no heed.

KAMALA DAS

139

Poets, even the most insignificant of them, are different from
other people. They cannot close their shops like shopmen and
return home. Their shop is their mind and as long as they carry
it with them they feel the pressures and the torments. A poet’s
raw material is not stone or clay; it is her personality, I could
not escape from my predicament even for a moment. I was
emotional and over-sensitive. Whenever a snatch of unjustified
scandal concerning my emotional life reached me through well-
meaning relatives I wept like a wounded child for hours, roll-
ing on my bed and often took sedatives to put myself to sleep.

When my mental stability weakened, some friends encourag-
ed me to drink heavily, taking me to their houses equipped
with bars, and, drunk, I was a great entertainer holding forth on
the exalted subjects of divine love and nirvana. How they must
have laughed to hear my talks ! I do not have the faintest re-
collection, fortunately, of those lost hours when I was a puppet
at the mercy of gross men and women.

And yet Calcutta gifted me with beautiful sights which built
for me the sad poems that I used to write in my diary in those
days. It was at Calcutta that I saw for the first time the eu-
nuchs’ dance. It was at Calcutta that I first saw a prostitute,
gaudily painted like a cheap bazar toy. It was at Calcutta
that I saw the ox-carts moving along the Strand Road early in
the morning with proud heavy-turbaned men, their tattooed
wives with fat babies dozing at their breasts like old drunkards
in clubs at lonely hours.

We had a blue Ambassador car and an old driver named
Ramzan who used to drive me once a week to the Free School
Street where there was a book-shop that sold first editions. I
picked up some gilded volumes of Lawrence Hope from that
shop and presented them to the man I used to be infatuated with,
but he was so conventional, so cowardly that he went out im-
mediately to buy in return two volumes of Stefan Zweig to
return the favour, to be neatly ‘quits’. He was so afraid of
being seen with me that he always dragged his wife along when-
ever he came to call on us and I pitied her when I saw how
bored she was with our kind of conversation.

140

MY STORY

Finally I became wiser, understood what my grandmother
meant when she talked about breeding and left off pestering the
man. Wasn’t Carlo better bred than the man who did not know
how to accept a gift graciously ? In desperation I turned to my
friend. You do not love me at all, said Carlo, I am only a
waiting room between trains....

But he offered himself as a stiff drink, he offered to help me
forget and in the afternoons. I lay in his white arms, drowsily
aware that he was only water, only a pale green pond glimmer-
ing in the sun. In him I swam, all broken with longing, in his
robust blood I floated, drying on my tears. Carlo reminded me
of the pond at Nalapat where I used to lie sunning my face and
my growing limbs. He reminded me of the ancient Neermatala
tree which had at one time a string hammock tied onto its bran-
ches where I lay listening to the gentle sounds of the summer
afternoons....

38

Delhi streets were fragrant & murky...
I felt very young

Delhi :

Our house crouches in dust in the
Evenings when the buffaloes tramp
Up the road, the weary herdsmen
Singing soft Punjabi songs, and
Girls from free municipal schools
Pause shyly at our gate and smile.
What have I to offer them but
My smile, a half-dead, fraudulent
Thing, what have I to offer at
This shrine of peace, but my constant.
Complaining voice ? Forgive us. We
Are paltry creatures, utter snobs.

Who disowned our mothers only
Because their hands, we noticed, were
Work-worn, and so to seek richer
Mothers and better addresses
We must move on, and on, until
We too, some day, by our children
May be disowned.. ..

When my husband was sent to Delhi and to the Planning
Commission on a three years’ deputation, I thought that I
would enjoy the change of scene. I had not travelled much.
But my husband had always held jobs that entailed tours and
on his return from any unfamiliar place, I pestered him with
questions.

142

MY STORY

What was the colour of the sky, what was the vegetation,
how did the natives dress, what was the tune of their dialect...
and, always he furnished me with details that went into the
build-up of a locale for yet another story.

When we reached Delhi, we stayed for three days at the
Reserve Bank’s Visiting Officers’ Flat at Rabindra Nagar which
was cooled by a desert cooler and by the high hedges skirting
the lawn. There were flowers on the dining table and uniformed
servants to serve us.

On the fourth day we moved into the littlest flat at Defence
Colony, where we had no room at all to entertain friends who
came to call on us. There was a spiral staircase that took us
to a tiny balcony where we had placed two cane chairs. Beyond
that was a room full of our furniture and books where we sat
to eat hasty meals. The bathroom contained no water, except
at six in the morning for fifteen minutes. Our cook and driver
had to sleep on packing cases laid out on the back verandah.
The children were admitted to a school in the last term, after
our convincing the principal that the boys had high I.Qs.

I had a landlady who used to come silently into the flat to
spy on us and our activities, an old lady with a disarming smile.
I was miserable in that house for I had cultivated from child-
hood the habit of taking two baths every day and with a dry
faucet, all I could do was change my clothes twice and sponge
my body as though I were a sick woman. I shall die if I live
here for a full month, I told my husband.

During the first week, we received a telegram from my
brother which informed us that my father had collapsed with a
heart attack. I took the first flight home and reached Calicut
as soon as I could, to find my father lying drugged and unshaven
on his bed in the corridor facing the terrace. When he recog-
nized me, he wept with emotion. For a month I stayed near
him, sleeping on the terrace on a mattress laid out on the floor
and looked after him, serving him soups and fruit-juice. I had
once picked up for a rupee a second-hand book called “How to
make Hundred Delicious Soups” and it was easy for me to
make soups of any kind after having memorized the book.

KAMALA DAS

143

When my father was well enough to walk about in the
house, I went back to Delhi and then we moved into a flat at
Lajpat Nagar, which had cactii growing near the walls and a
little iron gate that creaked. Beyond the house was an open
space of an acre which separated our place from the slums.
Here the buflEaloes used to graze all day long, snorting at inter-
vals and coming to our house to rub their noses against the
rough surface of the walls.

Seated on the steps leading to the flat, I could watch the
slum dwellers cook their meals bending over sigrees and the blue
charcoal smoke rising... But almost every day, in one or other
of the huts, somebody died and there was loud wailing. Then
the dead body was taken out on a charpoy and carried away
to some place far away, while the relatives walked behind,
wailing flatly and monotonously as only the poor and the ab-
solutely hopeless know how to wail.

During this time my eldest son Monoo fell ill with a fever
that was later diagnosed as typhoid. I was panicky. Was it
what the slum dwellers had given him this seed of death ? I
told my husband that I was going to back to my home in Mala-
bar and live there peacefully with my children. Delhi was so
full of dust and bacteria !

To escape from our place in Lajpat Nagar, I went in the
evenings to the Planning Commission to pick up my husband
and on my way, saw the leaves being burnt on the sides of the
Aurangzeb Road and the smell of that smoke soothed my
nerves. The Delhi roads are the most beautiful roads that I
have ever seen, for they are shaded by large trees and are cool
and black. The names are beautiful too I used to pass through
a road named Soneri Bagh Road only because the name ap-
pealed to me. I envied those who had their bungalows near
such roads who breathed in the acrid smoke of burning leaves
at autumn time.

Then with the help of a friend we managed to get a better
flat at South Extension, a flat on the first floor, which we
reached climbing a staircase wrapped in bougainvillae, and the
fragrant Rangoon Creeper. We had as our landlord a youthful
romantic person who used to come visiting us with his wife.

144

MY STORY

who was warm as homemade bread and made me feel at ease
with her kind words. At that time I was pregnant for the third
time.

I had picked up a handful of friends in Delhi who were
well-read and intellectual. Whenever I felt well enough to go
out, one of them took me out to some play, a foreign film or an
art exhibition, or if we had the money we went to Kwality and
ate the biggest sundae. I was particularly fond of a drama
critic, a young man who resembled Mark Antony in his looks
and although he was younger than I, he became my best friend,
a friend I could count on when I needed an escort.

My husband was fond of him too. Whenever I looked
depressed or bored, my husband asked me to take the young
man and go for a stroll. Once the two of ns took a three whee-
led scooter and went for a noisy, jerky drive to the Defence
Colony. He took me to La Boheme and gave me Chinese tea
which tasted like plain boiled water to me, but I pretended to
have had an acquaintance with it, long before he bought it for
me.

After the La Boheme treat, he took me for a drive and we
had cider, sipping it straight from the bottle during the fast
drive, and it was dusk, and all the Delhi streets were fragrant
and murky. I felt very young, very lovely and delightfully
carefree...

39

Calicut gets a good crop of lunatics

It was again the time of rain and on

Every weeping tree the lush moss spread like

Eczema, and from beneath the s washy

Earth the fat worms surfaced to explode

Under rain. It rained on the day my son

Was born, a slanting rain that began with

The first labour pain and kept me

Company, sighing, wailing, and roaring

When I groaned so that I smiled and stopped my

Plaints to hear its grief. I felt then that

Only the selfish had fears, that only

The unloving felt pain and then the first

Tinge of blood seemed like another dawn

Breaking. For a while I too was earth.

In me the seed was silent, waiting as
A baby does for the womb’s quiet
Expulsion. This then was my destiny.

Walk into the waiting room, I had cried.

When once my heart was vacant, fill the
Emptiness, stranger, fill it with a child.

Love is not important that makes the blood
Carouse, nor the man who brands you with his
Lust, but is shed as slough at end of each
Embrace. Only that matters which forms as
Toadstool under lightning and rain, the soft
Stir in womb, the foetus growing, for
Only the treasures matter that were washed
Ashore, not the long blue tides that washed them
In. When rain stopped and the light was gay on our
Casuarina leaves, it was early
Afternoon. And, then, wailing into light
He came, so fair, a streak of light thrust

146

MY STORY

Into the faded light. They raised him
To me then, proud Jaisurya, my son.

Separated from darkness that was mine
And in me. The darkness I have known.

Lived with, The darkness of rooms where the old
Sit, sharpening words for future use.

The darkness of sterile wombs and that of
The miser’s pot, with the mildew on his coins-
Out of the mire of a moonless night was
He bom, Jaisurya, my son, as out of
The wrong is bom the right and out of night
The sundrenched golden day-.-

In the seventh month of my pregnancy I went to Calicut to
be with ray parents for the delivery and the lying in. This I
did with reluctance for I was not accustomed to stay away from
my sons for more than a week or two.

At that time my parents lived in a dimlit house on the out-
skirts of the town. The walls on either side of the gate had
turned black with lichen and it was possible to catch sight of
the snakes that lived in their many crevices, sticking their crusty
heads out to hiss at the passers-by. Lining the walls were the
hibiscus plants with their rugged roots and the blood-red
flowers.

Often a mad girl named Narayani came up to the gate and
grinned at me, mumbling afterwards of hunger. She had broken
teeth that ended in points.

There was yet another lunatic, an old woman called Am-
malu Amma who tried to flatter us into giving her clothes and
rice. The worst of the beggars was a pale woman in her thirties
who came silently carrying a dirty bundle tucked under an arm
and who began to rile us in the most pornographic language
after finishing her lunch. The servants used to drive her out but
she remained near the gate, shouting of the misdeeds of men who
were worse than dogs. She used to draw large crowds with her
oratory.

Calicut gets a good crop of lunatics in the summer months

KAMALA DAS

147

probably due to the heat of the roads and the dust rising from
under the wheels. The town burns with the fever of that merci-
less season. All the wells dry up. The frail varieties of vegeta-
tion die out. Only the weeds survive the heat, and the hardy
hibiscus.

I was afraid to step out of the house alone. I watched the
road, seated behind the flowered curtain of my room which was
cool as the shaded interior of a forest with dark teakwood
furniture and a dresser with a large mirror, oval-shaped, in
which I surveyed the convexity of my body with pride.

One morning I woke with pain and realized that I was about
to have the child. Our friend. Dr. Vimala Nayar came imme-
diately to take me in her car to the hospital. I saw the sky pale
and heard the chill winds whistling into my ears and wondered
if it was going to rain.

At the hospital I was put on the table in the delivery room
where, to distract my mind from the spasms of pain, I recited
the Gayatri mantra, and while the sun grew in my eyes, filling
my veins with its warmth I felt the baby slide along my thigh
and heard its loud cry. “It is a beautiful son,’* cried Vimala.

My mother lifted the baby from her hands and put him on
my bosom and I blessed him with long life, kissing the damp
crown of his head and called him Jaisurya. That was the only
naming ceremony that he ever had. He was big and lovely with
thick hair and long eyelashes. There was no room available
for me at the hospital that evening, and so the little one and I
slept on a makeshift bed laid out for us in the back verandah
near the lavatories and the garbage-pails filled with blood-stained
pads.

It rained throughout that night and to protect the baby my
sister and 1 lay on our sides making with our bodies a shelter
for him. I could not sleep for a minute, for the cold winds
blew on me, giving me cramps and making me wretched. I
compared the new boy’s fate with those of my elder sons’ and
felt pity for him. The others had been born inside the home.

148

MY STORY

and there had been tny grandmother to provide us with warmth.
That night I missed my dead grandmother.

In the morning my father arrived and took me home, seeing
my misery. But the misery did not end there. At home they
were preparing to give away in marriage my younger sister and
all through the day relatives and friends came to spread good-
will around, and instead of sitting in the drawing room they
deposited themselves on my bed or around it and deprived me
of privacy so that I found myself not being able to change my
blood-stained clothes, nurse the hungry baby or go to sleep.

The stream of visitors stopped their flow only at midnight.
I became miserable like a trapped animal. My breasts over-
flowed with milk, and yet I was shy to untie my blouse and let
my son suck at them. In pain and in misery I waited for the
first chance to be alone so that I might lock the door. But when
it came and I locked the door my parents were terrified. They
thought that I was going mad. They banged on my door.

Open the door, shouted the relatives. What are you doing
there alone with the baby ? I was in frenzy like a tigress that
feared for the safety of its cub. I held my baby to my breast
and shouted back at the people outside my door, I shall never
open the door ....

Then my elder brother was called in and he softened his
voice to request me to come out. I am your brother, he said,
tell me what is troubling you. And I opened the door to cling
to his shoulder and sob. He took me to his little cottage
where my sister-in-law gave me the best room and made me
comfortable.

When the baby was three- weeks-old, I returned to my home
in Delhi and at the airport in the early morning my husband
stood with outstretched arm to receive the littlest of our sons.
He was shown to the elder sons at lunch time and each of them
touched his pink toes with awe and a measure of tenderness.
My husband decided to call the new comer Shodoo, and
because my health had failed he took charge of his needs, made
the formula in the mornings, filled eight bottles with it and

KAMALA DAS

149

placed it in the fridge taking out one and heating it when the
baby cried for miJJs.

We engaged a stout sardami to look after him in the day-
time. She called him Kaka and threw him up in the air to
make him laugh. This game frightened us very much. But she
was kind to me and persisted in massaging my legs even when
I did not fancy any kind of massage.

40

Like the phoenix I rose from the ashes
of my past

I shall some day leave, leave the cocoon
You built around me with morning tea.
Love-words flung from doorways and of course
Your tired lust- I shall some day take
Wings, fly around, as often petals
Do. when free in air, and you dear one.

Just the sad remnant of a root, must
Lie behind, sans pride, on double beds
And grieve. But I shall some day return, losing
Nearly all, hurt by wind, sun and rain.

Too hurt by fierce happiness to want
A further jaunt or a further spell
Of freedom, and I shall some day see
My world, de-fleshed, de-veined, de-blooded.
Just a skeletal thing, then shut my
Eyes and take refuge, if nowhere else.

Here in your nest of familiar scorn... -

After my return to Delhi I found my health declining. The
right side of my abdomen ached dully and constantly. I coughed
throughout the night. I could not retain even the blandest
food. The nausea drove me to my bed where I lay looking
older than my years, I could not heave myself out of bed even
to receive visitors who came to see the child.

My constant companion realized with pain that I could no
longer go out with him for a walk or to see a film. Do you hate
me, he asked me one day, standing at the foot of the stairs. I

Kamala das

151

was dazed with fatigue and pain. I could not speak at all.
What has happened to you, Amy, he asked me. He left our
house with moist eyes. Very soon I was lying in the Wellington
Hospital, seriously ill.

Fortunately for me I had at that time in Delhi a friend who
was probably the most loving of women in the country. Her
name was Shirley. She had long brown hair, which she always
wore in a thick plait, and an innocent smile. She visited me at
the hospital every day to change my clothes and help me to
wash my hair. She thrust a large basin under the bed and while
I lay still she shampooed my hair. I wanted to cut it short but
she disagreed with me. You are going to get well, she said. If
God wished you to die so soon he would not have given you
the gift of a beautiful baby, she said, and this argument soothed
me.

My feet had become rigid and numb with the long illness
and Shirley rubbed cold cream gently on them to soften the
skin. I wept with gratitude. Off and on, Shirley rushed up to
the window to look out. What are you looking at so intently,
I asked her, but she did not answer. Later, when I was able
to move about, I saw from my window the red morgue to which
the dead were taken, all wrapped in white.

Often I heard from different parts of the hospital women
moaning, grieving over the death of some relative. At that
precise moment Shirley would come to me and tell me that a
child had fallen and hurt himself slightly and that the moaning
was his. “Sleep, Amy," she would whisper, “go back to sleep.”
I wanted to live for a few more years and be able to see my
little son play about on the green lawn. I prayed fervently for
recovery promising my God that I would live an exemplary life
if he spared me.

During my stay in Delhi I used to write regularly for the
journal named The Century which was run by the late
Mr. V.K. Krishna Menon. My parents had met him and had
perhaps known him but I had not, until the day he came to see
me at the hospital. I had earlier heard of his arrogance from
the young men who lived on the periphery of his social circle.

152

MY STORY

One of them told me that he had wanted to take me to Mr.
Menon, but the former minister had asked him why he should
meet this Kamala Das or any other writer for that matter. This
story had hardened my heart against Mr. Menon, but when he
visited me, scolding the nurses for not being more careful and
wiped my damp forehead himself with a corner of a towel I was
astonished at my discovery. He had not made it known to any
that he was kind-hearted.

I had lost during that illness the resemblance to anything
human. I looked like a moulting bird. My skin had turned
dark and scaly. My voice had thinned to a whisper. When
the hospital finally discharged me, Shirley’s brother-in-law
wrapped me in a rug and carried me up the stairs to deposit me
on a clean bed. My little son was frightened of my looks and
burst out crying. My second son tried for several days to rub
mustard oil on my scaly legs to make me look normal again.

Like the phoenix, 1 rose from the ashes of my past, I for-
got the promises that I had made to God and became once
more intoxicated with life. My lips had without rest uttered
the sweet name of Lord Krishna while I lay ill, but when I
recovered my health I painted them up with pink lipstick. On
moonlit nights once again I thought wistfully of human love...

Then we moved into a house in Man Nagar where, even in
the hot summer, the desert cooler churning up the frothy air
chilled by the water and the khus screen, made us reach out for
our blankets at night. Leaving the South Extension house had
deprived us of two warm-hearted friends, Professor Thapar
and Sukrita Luthra, who were both very kind to us. The
professor used to visit us in the evenings and sit on our veran-
dah -holding our naked baby close to his chest, and discussing
war-strategy which was his pet subject. Mrs, Luthra was our
landlady and was an adopted sister of mine who pacified my
baby whenever it cried out for no apparent reason.

At Man Nagar my life became very happy. In front of our
house was a piece of dark green lawn bordered with flowering
hedges. Crossing the road we could reach the lush green of the
Lody Gardens where, beyond the tombs of Ibrahim Ix)dy and

KAMALA DAS

153

Sikander Lody stretched a pond, half hidden by the water lilies.
We went to the Lody Gardens to walk my son under its trees.
My second son picked the red berries that had fallen on the
ground.

I was wanted in those days, loved as men love their women,
but I yearned for a change, a new life. I was looking for an
ideal lover. I was looking for the one who went to Mathura
and forgot to return to his Radha. Perhaps I was seeking the
cruelty that lies in the depths of a man’s heart. Otherwise why
did I not get my peace in the arms of my husband ? Subcon-
sciously I hoped for the death of my ego. I was looking for an
executioner whose axe would cleave my head into two. The
ones who loved me did not understand why I was restive. You
are like a civet cat in a cage, said a friend of mine looking at
me walk up and down biting my nails. Take some gin, he said.
It will quiet your nerves. You are alwa5's dissatisfied, cried my
husband. Only I can understand you, said my Italian friend,
come away with me...

41

I withdrew into the cave I had made for myself

They did this to her, the maa who know her, the man
She loved, who loved her*not enough, being selfish
And a Coward, the husband who neither loved nor
Used her, but was a ruthless watcher, and the band
Of cynics she turned to, clinging to their chests where
New hair sprouted like great-winged moths, burrowing her
Face into their smells and their young lusts to forget.

To forget, oh, to forget, and, they said, each of
Them, I do not love, I cannot love, it is not
In my nature to love, but I can be kind to you.

They let her slide from pegs of sanity into
A bed made soft with tears, and she lay there weeping.

For sleep had lost its use. I shall build walls with tears»
She said, walls to shut me in. Her husband shut her
In, every morning, locked her in a room of books
With a streak of simshine lying near the door, like
A yellow cat, to keep her company, but soon
Winter came, and one day while locking her in, he
Noticed that the cat of sunshine was only a
Line, a half- thin line, and in the evening when
He returned to take her out, she was a cold and
Half dead woman, now of no use at all to men.

In Delhi, the winter is full of enchantment. The sun falls
over the city gently like a sliver of butter on a piece of toast.

Everything smells of that white, kind sun, not the grass alone
or the berries fallen from the trees, but the children with their
red cheeks roughened by the night’s chill and the young men
drinking cona coffee at the Coffee House waiting for their current

KAMALA DAS

155

lovers to join them. Even the Tibetan bronzes at Janpath laid
out in front of the Imperial Hotel, smell not of their metal, but
of the sun.

I used to walk my baby to the Khan Market, not taking the
normal route, the quiet street outside, but running across the
grass that grew unkempt between the houses of Man Nagar, and
once there, I went to admire the books at Fakir Chands, where
the younger man was full of courtesy and friendliness. His
wife was very beautiful.

He knew that I hardly ever had the money to purchase all
the books I lovingly picked up to smell their new jackets, but
he was patient with me. Once, when my father was expected
at Delhi for a short stay, I wandered round the Khan Market
trying to find a walking stick and Fakir Chand went into his
house and got for me as a gift one of his father’s sticks. This is
one of the most unforgettable incidents that happened during
our stay in Delhi.

My children used to eat a lot of ice-cream every day. The
baby used to wear in those days a navy blue cardigan which
was a perfect foil for his pink complexion. I walked proud as the
Virgin Mary, holding my baby by his chubby hand.

At that time my eldest son was fifteen. He told me one day
while we were all relaxing on the grass, that he wanted to go
steady with a girl. There were no secrets between us. He said
that he wanted a beautiful girl, preferably a blonde with blue
eyes. His ideas of feminine beauty were derived from the com-
ics he had been reading from his childhood. I thought it a
tall order. But as though in answer to my prayers, a girl with
ash blonde hair stood on my doorstep the next morning.

She had come with a young girl who used to frequent my
house. This is Anna, said the Indian girl, she is from West
Germany. From that day onwards, she was my son’s special
friend. They remained on the terrace of our house talking of
French literature and Marxism. Anna was the most brilliant
girl who had walked into my house.

For Monoo, it was his first adolescent love. When the girl
went for a week to Calcutta on a sightseeing tour with her aunts.

156

MY STORY

Monoo asked us to send him with her, but my husband told
him that he could not possibly waste money on encouraging a
puppy-love. Monoo in despair took all his comics, the collec-
tion of a life-time, and sold them to a second-hand dealer and
made enough money to travel to Calcutta by third class. . On
the way he trembled in the severe cold, until a labourer, taking
pity on him, gave him a beedi to smoke. On his return he told
me of all those discomforts with a smile that made me feel proud
of him.

You have spoilt your son for good, said my husband. This
love for a gentle and brilliant girl transformed Monoo into a
full-fledged intellectual. He read far into the night and wrote
faintly political articles which some journals began to publish.
When my husband was transferred back to Bombay, Monoo
was heartbroken. After a couple of months, Anna went back
to Germany to continue with her education. For a year or two
they corresponded, but then each found other diversions in their
respective coimtries. But the maturity that Anna had given
him remained, to become a part of my son.

In Bombay, we were led to a flat owned by the Reserve
Bank at Cadell Road. It was on the ground floor and had
broken window panes through which the cold winds blew from
the Arabian sea, which was only a few yards away. At the time
of the high tide, the sea came thumping against the wall that
separated our house from the beach, which was mouldy and
fetid with the rotting garbage washed ashore.

None walked there in the evenings except some lovers who
had no money to go anywhere else for their love-making and a
few loafers who hoped to snatch a gold chain or a purse from
the couples in the dark. My eldest son took me for walks in
the evening along the sea-shore, and a Bengali family mistook
us to be lovers. He had grown tall and intense looking. Seeing
us together, nobody would have guessed that we were mother
and son.

At night, the sea rushed noisily through my veins, giving me
chronic insomnia. All I could do was sit at the dining table
and write poetry. I wrote until it was j.five and the rryilkmaTi

KAMALA DAS

157

clanked at the gate, with his cycle and his pails. Then I went
to lie near my husband and my child.

Finally, fearing that I would go mad there, I persuaded my
husband to shift to a place in Churchgate. This was another
of the many buildings owned by the Reserve Bank of India.
This stood between the sprawling Sachivalaya and the Esso
Park where the children arrived in the evenings with their ayahs
to play in the grass. We made friends with our neighbours, the
Deshmukhs, the Menons and the Vaz family.

Wherever a writer goes, her notoriety precedes her. The
non- writers do not normally trust the writers. This is because
they are entirely dissimilar, except in appearance. The mind being
an invisible limb, is not taken into consideration. Even birds
have their own particular heights. The land birds who do not
rise far into the lonely sky, often wonder why the eagles fly
high, why they go round and round like ballerinas.

The essence of the writer eludes the non-writer. All that the
writer reveals to such people are her oddities of dress and her
emotional excesses. Finally, when the muscles of the mind have
picked up enough power to read people’s secret thoughts, the
writer shies away from the invisible hostility and clings to her
own type, those dreaming ones, born with a fragment of wing
still attached to a shoulder.

As I wrote more and more, in the circles I was compelled
to move in, I became lonelier and lonelier. I felt that my lone-
liness was like a red brand on my face. In company when there
were dinners at any friend’s house, I sat still as a statue, feeling
the cruel vibrations all around me. Then my husband realized
my plight and stopped taking me out anywhere.

I withdrew into the cave I had made for myself where I
wrote stories and poems and became safe and anonymous.
There were books all round me, but no friend to give me
well-meaning advice, no relative telling me of my discrediting
my family-name, by my unconventional ways of thinking....

42

The last of my lovers : handsome dark one
with a tattoo between his eyes

The Beginning of Autumn :
She floats in her autumn.
Yellowed like a leaf
And free.

Autumn is the season for yellowing. When I entered middle
age with reluctance, I found to my dismay that my body’s con-
tours had changed, although imperceptibly. My skin had turn-
ed gross.

In the morning I was used to picking up my glasses from
my dresser and glancing at the reflection of my face in the mir-
ror. At that hour my face seemed the freshest. It was as if
the gentle nights and all their dreams had cast a golden bloom
over my face, a fall of dew to damp my skin. But after thirty-
five, there were seldom any dreams at all in my sleep and the
face that I saw in the glass appeared merely haggard.

What was happening to me, I wondered. Was it no longer
possible to lure a charming male into a complicated and satisfy-
ing love affair with the right words, the right glances, the right
gestures ? Was I finished as a charmer ? Then with the force
of a typhoon he conquered me, the last of my lovers, the most
notorious of all, the king of all kings, the bison among animals,
the handsome dark one with a tattoo between his eyes.

He was coming out of a cloth shop at Churchgate and I was

KAMALA DAS

159

walking in. His face was familiar to me. T stared at him in
fascination. There were several stories circulating about his
innumerable love affairs and his sexual prowess. In my eyes he
was a magnificent animal.

He turned back again and again to see why I stared so hard
at him. I did not resemble any of the usual nymphomaniacs,
probably because I was never one. Having an active brain, I
did not have the round, glassy, flowerlike face that normally ap-
peals to a libertine. I was plain, very brown and I did not like
coquetry. He must have put my face out of his mind imme-
diately.

In the month of October, a friend of ours who was celebrat-
ing a birthday, forced me to drink a gimlet with the rest of the
ladies present, and within an hour I felt dizzy and ill. When I
reached home, I collapsed on my bed with a temperature of
105 degrees. Next morning, the fever remained high to puzzle
my doctor who put me on penicillin immediately. I was well
enough to read books lying in my bed, wrapped in a blanket.

My friend Nissim Ezekiel visited me, spent the day in my
room reading the paperbacks strewn all over my bed and sharing
the glasses of fruit juice with me. Nissim is an ideal companion
for any sick person. He is kind and gentle. He does not speak
loud enough to harm the nerves of the hearer.

After ten days of illness, my blood was examined and it was
found to contain too many leucocytes. The doctor was worried.
The specialist who was called in, showed anxiety. Could it be
Leukaemia ? They removed me to the Bombay Hospital an
hour before our lunchtime. I did not bid farewell to my child
who was playing in the next room. From the car that took
me to the hospital I studied the roads and the landmarks in
order to be able to return as a ghost, after death, to my home,
to be with my children. I believed that I was going to die.

The room that I was allotted was painted green and had
green drapes. It had an airconditioner. It resembled an un-
der water cabin. There was a dresser painted in white and an
extra bed for any relative who wished to keep the patient com-
pany. I crept under the sheets and fell asleep. Dr. Goyal was

160

MY STORY

the honorary chosen to cure me. He wore every day a new shiny
suit and a bow tie. He assured me that I was going to be all
right.

In the adjacent room was a little child suffering from Men-
ingitis who uttered harsh bird-cries intermittently. It was an
unforgettable sound. He had a private nurse who crept into
my room occasionally to peer into my face and nod her head in
sympathy. Leukaemia is not curable, she said. I can lend you
my magazines. She brought me two issues of True Confessions
which were full of pictures.

I asked her why the child’s parents were not around to com-
fort him. She laughed a mirthless laugh. They are rich people,
she said, they will not be able to sleep in the hospital.... All
through that night I heard the shrill cry of the child but a little
before drawn I fell asleep. When I woke up the cry had stopped,
but there were the swishy sounds of cleaning coming from his
room, the mop beating against the wet floor and the bucket be-
ing dragged. The private nurse entered my room to take away
her magazines. The child expired at four, she said, my duty is
over, I must go.

Every morning the boys from the laboratory on the first
floor woke me up at six shouting for my blood. Khoon, khoon,
they shouted, pushing their trays and trolleys and switching on
all the bright lights. After the blood was taken they sent their
henchmen to collect in jam bottles the urine, the bowel move-
ment and the sputum. I was wheeled often to the dark X’ray
room where the attendant gently removed my upper clothes and
laid me out on the long table under the machine. The fever
remained with me. My brother and my sister, both doctors of
considerable merit, were called to Bombay. My lung had an
abscess, my liver had an abscess and something had gone wrong
with my heart.

And, yet, my husband who had never read a medical book
in all his life, told me that I was going to get well. My room’s
number was 565. It proved to be lucky for me. I surprised
the doctors and the various specialists by recovering fully. I was
taken from the hospital to the airport and put inside a plane
that was flying to Delhi. The idea was to keep me in my bro-

KAMALA DAS

161

ther’s house for a period of observation. One night I vomited
a mass of green, resembling tangled seaweeds, and afterwards
felt completely cured.

Health has its own anointments. When I recovered from my
serious illness, I grew attractive once again. Then at the air-
port I collided with the elderly man who had once fascinated me
just by turning back to glance darkly at me. I had heard of his
fabulous lusts. He drew me to him as a serpent draws its dazed
victim. I was his slave. That night I tossed about in my bed
thinking of his dark limbs and of his eyes glazed with desire.
Very soon we met and fell I into his arms.

You are my Krishna, I whispered kissing his eyes shut. He
laughed. I felt that I was a virgin in his arms. Was there a
summer before the autumn of his love ? Was there a dawn be-
fore the dusk of his skin ? I did not remember. I carried him
with me inside my eyelids, the dark God of girlhood dreams. At
night from the lush foxholes of the city, his concubines wailed
for him. Oh Krishna, oh Kanhaiya, do not leave me for an-
other.

I wrote him letters when I could not meet him. He hated
such letters. Do not get sentimental, he said. Don’t write silly
letters.... I should have gone away from him immediately. But
I stayed near him, smuggling against his hairless chest, burrow-
ing my tear-stained face into the deep curve of his arm. Each
time we parted, I asked him, when I am to meet you again,
and combing his iron grey hair, his eyes meeting mine in the
glass, he always said, darling, we shall meet after two days...

There were eighteen mirrors in his room, eighteen ponds into
which I dipped my hot brown body. Beyond that room was an
enclosed verandah where we stood together to look at the sea.
The sea was our only witness. How many times I turned to it
and whispered, oh, sea, I am at last in love, I have found my
Krishna....

43

‘‘I too tried adultery for a short while”

You planned to tame a swallow, to hold her

In the long summer of your love so that she would forget

Not the raw seasons alone, and the homes left behind, but

Also her nature, the urge to fly, and the endless

Pathways of the sky. It was not to gather knowledge

Of yet another man that I came to you but to leam

What I was, and by learning, to learn to grow, but every lesson

You gave was about yourself. You were pleased

With my body’s response, its weather, its usual shallow

Convulsions- You dribbled spittle into ray mouth, you poured

Yourself into every nook and cranny, you embalmed

My poor lust with your bitter-sweet juices. You called me wife,

I was taught to break saccharine into your tea and
To offer at the right moment the vitamins. Cowering
Beneath your monstrous ego I ate the magic loaf and
Became a dwarf. I lost my will and reason, to all your
Questions I mumbled incoherent replies. The summer
Begins to pall. I remember the ruder breezes
Of the fall and the smoke from burning leaves. Your room is
Always lit by artificial lights, your windows always
Shut. Even the airconditioner helps so little.

All pervasive is the male scent of your breath. The cut flowers
In the vases have begun to smell of human sweat. There is
No more singing, no more a dance, my mind is an old
Playhouse with all its lights put out. The strong man’s technique is
Always the same, he serves his love in lethal doses,

For love is Narcissus at the water’s edge, haunted
By its own lonely face, and yet it must seek at last
An end, a pure and total freedom, it must will the mirrors
To shatter, and the kind night to erase the water....

KAMA LA DAS

163

Like the majority of city-dwelling women, I too tried adul-
tery for a short while, but I found it distasteful. My lover had
entered the decline of his career and aroused in me, more than
love, a strong sense of pity.

His admirers were keeping away. His phone was silent. No
favours were asked. He wore the sad aura of a king in exile. I
wanted to offer my life to him, but it was only a tarnished tro-
phy and perhaps worthless. There was only one arbour left for
him, the snuggery between strong limbs and for his weary eyes,
the pink blindness against my pores.

Even while I held him close to my body, he muttered, I see
the reds rise like a rash, the gates fall open, the walls crumble,
all laws get trampled in the dust, but I am powerless to do any-
thing for this country.... When we embraced, we fell in the ceru-
lean pools of his many mirrors as a deathless motif, repeating
and repeating, the reflection of a reflection, the shadow of a
shadow, the dream of a dream, and yet I hated the exploitation
of my body. The silly female shape had again intervened to
ruin a beautiful relationship, the clumsy gadgetry that always,
always, damaged bonds.

I asked myself sadly, must my body always ride the gentler,
wiser mind ! Then in what I once hated, I discovered beauty.
Oh, the moments of his stillness and the fast flutter of his breath!
And the silence that healed for a while the ancient bruises of the
soul. His body became my prison. I could not see behind it.
His darkness blinded me and his love-words shut out the wise
world’s din.

Years after all of it had ended, I asked myself why I took
him on as my lover, fully aware of his incapacity to love and I
groped in my mind for the right answers. Love has a beginning
and an end, but lust has no such faults. I needed security, I
needed permanence, I needed two strong ' arms thrown around
my shoulders and a soft voice in my ear. Physical integrity
must carry with it a certain pride that is a burden to the soul.
Perhaps it was necessary for my body to defile itself in many
ways, so that the soul turned humble for a change.

It was a humbler woman who finally rose from his pleasure-

164

MY STORY

couch and walked away, not turning once to say goodbye,
making up my mind as swiftly as I had made up my physical
responses. It was a game in which he was going to lose heavily.
I did not believe in receiving any gift that was not abstract. I
wanted to grow in him like cancer, I wanted him to suffer from
incurable love. This cruelty is typical of women when they are
in love. He said you are a mad girl, but long live your mad-
ness ...

Yes, it is true that I loved him. Not madly as he thought
I did, but sanely, guided both by the wisdom of my body and
by that of my mind. At the first touch of his body, all my past
infatuations were obliterated. It was as if his dark body was
the only body left alive. All the other deaths were silent; no
requiems were sung for those love affairs. Besides, who had
the time to remember anything in that room with the eighteen
mirrors ?

City fathers, friends and moralists, if I were a sinner, do not
forgive my sin. If I were innocent, do not forgive my inno-
cence. Burn me with torches blood-red in the night, burn my
proud Dravidian skin and burn the tumult at the core. Or,
bury me in your back garden, fill my crevices with the red dust
of Bombay, plant gentle saplings on my belly, for, he and I met
too late, we could get no child of our own, my love for him was
just the writing of the sea, just a song borne by the wind....

Free from that last of human bondage, I turned to Krishna.
I felt that the show had ended and the auditorium was empty.
Then He came, not wearing a crown, not wearing make-up, but
making a quiet entry. What is the role you are going to play,
I asked Him. Your face seems familiar. I am not playing any
role, I am myself. He said. In the old playhouse of my mind,
in its echoing hollowness. His voice was sweet. He had come
to claim me, ultimately. Thereafter He dwelt in my dreams.
Often I sat crosslegged before a lamp reciting mantras in His
praise.

I lost weight. One day I fell in a heap gasping for breath.
Once again I was in Room No. 565 of the Bombay Hospital.
My doctor said that there was no cause for alarm. It is only
Myocarditis, he said.

KAMALA das

165

After a series of tests, two operations were carried out on
my body. When I was getting ready for the more major of the
two. my sister sat near me reciting the Durgakavacham. I am
not praying for your recovery, she said, I am praying for pro-
tection in death if death is to be your destiny. I felt calm and
carefree. I tried to picture to myself the form of the glorious
Goddess Durga. I saw her in red, resplendent in gem-encrusted
jewellery. It was with this vision that I became unconscious
on the operating table.

When I woke up after several hours, I saw a lovely face
bending over mine. You are Durga, I asked her and she said,
yes, but how did you know it was my name.... Later I found
out that it was a lady-doctor who was attending on me who
was named Durga by her parents but had it changed to Rama
after marriage. She did not know that I mistook her for the
benign Goddess.

Room No. 565 was familiar to me. It was therefore like a
homecoming. My doctors were extra kind. They held my
hand and talked to me with affection. There was in particular
a young, balding one, who smoked Benson and Hedges and
scattered their butts on the floor. I liked the smell his thick
fingers left on my hands.

I spent an hour in the morning reciting my prayers. The
doctor allowed me to be wheeled every morning to the tem-
ple of Krishna where I gazed on that indescribably lovely face
in rapture. Isn’t it time yet to take me back to you, I asked
Him. I had had enough of this earth and all its bitter gifts.
My husband thought that I was losing my mind. I was given
sedatives and asked to rest in bed for three months. In bed
again, I thought of His blueness. His wide eyes and His knowing
smile.

I was losing patience. I could not understand the purpose
of my return from the hospital or of the resurrection of my
health. On some days, seated before the mirror, and painting
up my pale lips, I felt all of a sudden uneasy. I saw the lonely
eyes reflected in the mirror clouding over as though a mist had
enveloped them. I was looking into the depths of my loneli-
ness. Then I felt that I was applying paint on the lips of a

166

MY STORY

corpse. Death leans against my hedge. My soul fills my body
with a certain incense. If death touches me, the fragrance will
leave my body and in its place will be an unbearable stench.
Even my sons who kiss my cheeks now will then be filled with
horror .

When I told my second son that I had planned to return to
them as a ghost after my death in the hospital, he said, please

don’t do that, we shall all be so afraid of you His words left

me crushed. I was at that moment more ignorant, more naive.
I was naive enough to promise my husband that I would return
in all the coming births as his wife.

In actuality who is he? Who am I? Who are these three
boys who call themselves my children? We are burdened with
perishable bodies which strike up bonds which are also unreal,
and perishable. The only relationship that is permanent is the
one which we form with God. My mate is He. He shall come
to me in myriad shapes. In many shapes shall I surrender to
His desire. I shall be fondled by Him. I shall be betrayed by
Him. I shall pass through all the pathways of this world,
condemning none, understanding all and then become part of
Him. Then for me there shall be no return journey....

44

I was never a nymphomaniac...

This then was our only inheritance, this ancient
Virus that we nurtured in the soul so

That when at sundown, the Mueazin’s high wail sounded from
The mosque, the chapel-bells announced the angelus, and
From the temple rose the Brahmin’s assonant chant, we
Walked with hearts grown scabrous with a hate, illogical.

And chose not to believe, what we perhaps vaguely sensed,
That it was only our fathers’ lunacy speaking,

In three different tones babbling, slay them who do not
Believe, or better still, disembowel their young ones
And scatter on the streets their meagre innards. Oh God,
Blessed be your fair name, blessed be the religion.

Purified in the unbelievers’ blood, blessed be
Our sacred city, blessed be its incarnadined glory....

When the war for the liberation of Bangladesh was going on
my eldest son was down with an attack of jaundice. One parti-
cularly dark evening, while I was standing on the terrace of our
flat, I heard the loud siren begin to wail. I could see the sea
beyond the grey buildings looking dark as tar.

For days on end we had been discussing the war and its
prospects and I knew that if there was to be a raid on Bombay
the Pak planes would enter from the West over the sea, our
neighbour. Our house was near the docks. To its left was the
sprawling Sachivalaya where the ministers worked on their files
and to the right was situated the new Radio and T. V. centre.

168

MY STORY

What a lark it would be for the Pak bombers to swoop down
on us !

The residents of the building had sent to each house a note
requesting all to run down the stairs whenever the siren sounded
and to huddle themselves near the stairs at the basement. The
lift was not to be used for the emergency. So I had anyway
decided to stay up in our sixth floor flat with our ailing son
and, if need be, die with dignity rather than get crushed like a
pack of rodents near the stairs in the basement.

The rest of my family felt that they could not leave us alone,
and so all of us made an air-raid shelter in our boxroom, laying
a mattress on its floor for the sick one and stocking its shelves
with water, loaves of bread, a first-aid kit and a shovel.

When 1 first heard the siren I remained on the terrace. For
a few minutes the city became unnaturally silent. The darkness
of the sky seemed damp. There was not one star visible. Then
from the north-west rose four red lights. Behind them in a pretty
formation arrived a few more red lights. I thought they were
the Pak planes. I went in to inform my family that the planes
were near at hand. My husband and my second son seemed
panic-stricken. Within another minute we heard loud bangs all
around us and believed that we were getting bombed.

In those days we had in our drawing room a bronze idol of
Ganesh which I worshipped each morning after my bath. I lit
the lamp in front of him and sat down to pray. My little son
climbed into my lap. The red sindur that I had sprinkled on
his golden body seemed like blood to me at that moment. Was
my Ganapati a wounded soldier ?

The siren’s baby-wail unnerved me. It sounded like a baby
crying out in fear. Then I discovered with a jolt that I loved
the city of Bombay and did not want it to be hurt, ever. In
Malabar, when little babies are being bathed, the nurse- maids
sing a song that goes like this : “little legs, grow and grow, little
hands, grow and grow...” I wanted to take the weeping city in
my arms and sing soothing songs to it. I showered on it my
blessings while the loud reports vibrated around our building.
Dear city, let new merchandise fill your markets. Let the

KAMALA DAS

169

wealthy devotees ring the bells at your temples every day. Let
your courtesans grow sleek and beautiful' day by day. Let
your gardens resound with children’s laughter. Let the haughty
ladies who promenade on your Marine Drive grow haughtier,
lovelier....

It was with relief that we heard that the planes were chased
away by the anti-aircraft guns. Our house usually fills itself
with writers and economists in the evening. Some of us were
opposed to the Government’s policy of helping Bangladesh and
its refugees. Frankly we considered Bangladesh a pain in the
neck. We knew that helping them would fracture our economy
and win for us only fleeting praise from the international scene.
We had enough hungry people of our own, enough homeless
ones who slept on the pavements and under awnings. Often,
returning from some dinner at the Taj Mahal Hotel, we had
seen on its many door steps old men lying curled up braving
the rain and coughing their lungs out. And, coming home I
would see from my verandah the large empty buildings of the
Sachivalaya, the State Bank of India and the All India Radio
all shuttered and padlocked, with all that space going waste.

I have often wondered why the Government cannot pass an
order that all huge buildings must let out their basement hall
for the homeless during the harsh monsoons and during the
winter. Every hotel can be made to spend one tenth of its daily
earnings in feeding the poor. Charity is India’s ancient tradi-
tion. There is no harm in reviving it when the times are hard.
The British influence has changed the urban people’s attitude
towards beggary. They shout at those who arrive near the gate
with outstretched arms. Do not encourage beggary, they shout
at those who feel tempted to share their meal with the poor.

The newspapers are to be blamed for this callousness that
has become fashionable. If one of them had the decency to
report the giving away of alms by some charitable-minded
person other kind people would follow the example if only to
get some publicity. I long to read in the newspapers one story,
just one little story, of some one giving away a few clothes to
the poor, a few blankets in winter or some fruits for the children
who wonder on the roads picking up their lunches from the

170

MY STORY

garbage heaps. We read only of the crimes and of the empty
statements made by the ministers at some conference or other.
The papers fill us with disgust. Why are the good deeds never
reported ? To the west of our house is a park where an old
man comes with two attendants every day to distribute oranges
or mangoes to the poor children who wait for his arrival from
the early hours of the morning. I am filled with pride when I
watch him give the fruits to the little ones.

Disease and pain matured me. I forgot the art of localizing
my love. I found it easy to love nearly all those who came
to see us. Even to my husband I became a mother. He had
to learn to adjust to my metamorphosis, for in his eyes even
my broken-down doll of a body was attractive. It was not
what it was years ago. Impartially I scrutinized its flaws and its
virtues. It was like a cloth doll that had lost a few stitches here
and there. The scars of operations decorated my abdomen like
a map of the world painted crudely by a child. My breasts had
a slight sag. And yet this form continued to beguile my poor
husband. It upset him when I turned deeply religious.

I had shed carnal desire as a snake might shed its skin. I
could no longer pretend either. I was no longer bed-worthy, no
longer a charmer of lecherous men. But my poems had been
read by several people. My articles on free love had titillated
many. So I continued to get phone calls from men who wanted
to proposition me. It was obvious to me that I had painted of
myself a wrong image. I was never a nymphomaniac. Sex did
not interest me except as a gift I could grant to my husband to
make him happy. A few of our acquaintances tried to touch
me and made indiscreet suggestions. I was horrified. When I
showed my disgust at their behaviour they became my bitterest
critics and started to spread scandals about me. If I were really
promiscuous and obliging I would not have gained the hate and
the notoriety that my indifference to sex has earned for me.

45

Return to Nalapat ; Was my 24-year-old
marriage on the rocks ?

On sedatives
I am more lovable
Says my husband

My speech becomes a mist-laden terrain,
The words emerge tinctured with sleep.
They rise from still coves of dreams
In unhurried flight like herons.

And my ragdoll-limbs adjust better
To his versatile lust. He would if he could
Sing lullabies to his wife’s sleeping soul.
Sweet lullabies to thicken its swoon.

On sedatives
I grow more lovable
Says my husband....

As a marriage, in the conventional sense, mine was a flop.
There were silences between the two of us that seemed to me
interminable, although at times I broke them by a word or two
about our little son or about the grocer’s bill.

As a plaything for the slow Sunday afternoons and for the
nights, I had deteriorated much in quality. I could not even
feign lust, leave alone feel it. It needed strong tranquillisers to
tame my body into an acquiescent posture beneath my virile
mate.

For 32 years, ever since he graduated from the Loyola Col-
lege, bagging a medal for Economics, he had been working for

172

MY STORY

the Reserve Bank and for the Cause of the Indian Agriculturist.
As far back as I can recollect, his skin always smelt of the of-
fice files which were to be found under pillows and between the
sheets, giving me the uneasy feeling of having rivals in my bed.

When I was young and needed his companionship for my
emotional stability, he had sent me away to my grandmother
for six months, only to be able to devote even his soul to the
completion of a Rural Credit Survey Committee Report which
his favourite boss was at that time obsessed with. Such sub-
servience to his superiors may have built up his lacklustre ca-
reer briefly for a while, but it certainly destroyed my pride in
him.

Therefore when he told me, taking me into his confidence
for the first time, that his new superior was unreasonably brutal
with him. I only felt a sense of spiteful elation. I would have
laughed aloud but another look at his ashen face made me con-
trol my mirth. I discovered with a shock, that he had changed
imperceptibly with the dreary long years of the Reserve Bank
routine. He had aged prematurely. Grey wisps of hair made
for his face an untidy frame. His teeth had become discoloured
and bad. All that he knew well was the Agricultural Report
which was such an inconsequential component in the large jig-
saw of his life.

I felt very sorry for him all of a sudden. What makes this
man hate you so, I asked him. I don’t know he said, feebly,
perhaps he doesn’t like my colour, my looks....

Every evening he brought his files home and once a week he
flew to other cities hugging the papers on which he had worked
half the night. And yet his boss was petty with him, waiting to
catch him trip, so that he may be removed and a favourite in-
stalled in his place.

My husband had the feeling that the schemes that entailed
foreign aid were not really helpful to the small farmer, but only
helped the big agriculturist. He met with rude rebuttals or
stony silences, pregnant with accusations, whenever he voiced
his misgivings. Bureaucracy expected the smooth running of
machines, the files moving from stale hand to stale hand for the

KAMALA DAS

173

initiallings, but never, for a moment, wanted independent think-
ing to crop up like a loosened nail. Thinking was as bad as a
blockage in the bowels of a computer. All the answers would
then emerge wrong and very inconvenient.

If my husband had had a different kind of family, he would
have learned to eat his humble pie quietely and without any
fuss. But both our eldest son and 1 believed in socialism. We
believed in one being scrupulously honest to oneself.

One day at the airport, early in the morning, while my hus-
band and a few others of the Reserve Bank were waiting to
catch a plane, his boss for no justifiable reason humiliated him.
When the witnesses to the scene who were his prudent col-
leagues, vanished in a trice to save their own skins, my husband
walked up to the telephone booth and phoned me. His voice
was shaky, quavering like a sick man’s. I only asked him, why
do you always pick on me, my husband said on the phone, nar-
rating the incident. He muttered abuses and snarled at me, he
said.

I was angry. Resign immediately, get out of this humiliating
job, we shall go to Nalapat House and live with dignity, I cried
over the phone. Although we had as family friends, ministers,
politicians and members of Parliament, none could help us, al-
though they were aware that an honest, hardworking man was
being tormented. My husband, when he does not stoop, stands
six feet without his shoes, whereas the bully who made him lose
his self-confidence, was a tiny marionette of a man who had the
jerky movements of a tin-soldier.

It was of no use telling my husband to ignore the thrusts,
is health broke down. His thyroid got affected. It was great
torment for me and for my sons to see him suffer such igno-
miny at the hands of lesser men. I packed up my bags and left
for my home in Malabar, carrying with me my third son,

I wanted my husband to think over the prospect of resign-
ing from the Bank to settle down with me on my estate. For a
proud Dravidian, humble pie of any kind is the unhealthiest
diet. It was time that my husband realized it. His colleagues
boycotted him. None came forward to sympathise with him

174

MY STORY

when he was ordered to vacate his chair and his room in three
hours’ time. People like us who believe in the essential dignity
of human beings are always left isolated.

My eldest son Monoo went to Trivandrum to work under
the guidance of Dr. K.N. Raj. This move pleased me. I sin-
cerely believe in fraternizing with one’s own type. If you have
to survive, sanity and all, you must stick willy nilly to your own
intellectual caste. Others can only misjudge you. For sheer
survival, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Lytton Stra-
chey, Virginia Wolfe, Leonard Wolfe, Saxon Sydney Turner and
a few others of intelJectual eminence, huddled together in their
famous Bloomsbury group, wary of infiltrators, for they knew
that outside its barriers, they were doomed to feel excluded and
lonely.

When I reached Malabar, my relatives looked askance at me.
Why was I without my husband ? Had my outspoken autobio-
graphy that had been heraldically serialized in a well-known
Malayali journal, finally brought about a separation ? Was my
24-year-old marriage on the rocks ?

I ignored their questions and set myself the task of cleaning
up the old house. There were scorpions behind every photo-
graph hung on the wall, lithe dark ones that curled up their
tails when I lifted the picture and exposed them to the sun. Bats
flew about in the evening but during the day, hung in clusters
like some dark fruit from the rafters of the bathrooms. My
child was terrified of these creatures, and of the civet cats that
moved noisily on the ceilings. Each time one of them caught
a mouse, the snarl and the squeak were frightening to the two
of us who slept on our four-poster bed beneath the wooden ceil-
ing.

Let us go back to Bombay, he cried on the first night after
our return to Nalapat. I wrapped him in one of my soft silk
sarees and lay near him, holding his little form in a tight em-
brace. This is our home, I told him. This is where we belong....

I have never heard the wind sing as beautifully as at Nala-
pat, over the tree-tops and the three ponds and at times, run-
ning up from the seashore, all smelling of fish and of the tar of

KAMALA DAS

175

the fishing boats. I engaged seven servants to look after onr
needs. The house had a desolate air and there were stories cir-
culated in the locality, of its many ghostly inhabitants.

My chief maid was a 70-year-old woman named Kalyani
Amma, who told me that I ought to abandon the city-clothes
and wear the traditional attire of the Nair woman. You must
wear lots and lots of gold, she said. Otherwise at the temple
pond where I go to bathe, the women will make fun of me. So
I turned traditional. I gave away all my sarees to the typists
of the village who were aspiring to move away to towns for new
jobs and took to wearing the dress of my ancestresses, the three
yards of white cloth as underwear and the two and a half as
overwear. The white blouse and the heavy gold jewellery. The
sandal paste drawn in a line on the forehead.

My servants were happy with me. I reclaimed the land and
began to cultivate it. I sang ballads with my field-hands as they
sowed the seed, standing knee deep in the mud. The mistress
of the Nalapat house is back, they cried out in sheer happiness.
At that moment I regretted the years spent in Bombay, Delhi
and in Calcutta, separated from my house, my trees and my
fields.

Each big tree at Nalapat had had on its bark, two feet above
its base, my name engraved on it with a knife, but all except
the fragrant Nirmatala were cut down. I wept at the arid look
of the yard where once there were large shady trees that filtered
the noonday sun, to make it fall soft as twilight on the white
sand where we played as children. Even the old mango tree
facing my grandmother’s room was nowhere to be seen. When
my grandfather lay dying, he had told his wife that the mango
tree had dolls all over its branches, lovely dolls beckoning to him
with their sunny smiles. Its absence hurt me like the death of
a grandmother.

I walked around like a lost woman among the wild ferns,
looking for old land-marks. I had taken a sentimental journey
to my childhood-home. I did not want to return to the imper-
sonal city and its tension, once again in disillusionment.

I cleared the snake shrine of all its weeds, scraped the lichen

176

MY STORY

off the idols and lit the stone lamps. I engaged a carpenter to
repair the garners where in my grandmother’s days, the harvest-
ed grain used to be stored. My child learnt carpentry from
him. We bought two cows.

It was an idyllic existence. My husband, coming to us on
leave, found us looking fat and sleek. He felt tempted to resign
from the Reserve Bank and settle down with us, but he said,
let us wait for another year, let Chinnen complete his College
education. Bombay was a mistake, he said.

How right he was. I should never have taken to wearing
the coloured clothes of the city. I should have dressed only in
white and I should have loaded my limbs with gold. I should
never have done house-keeping at a small flat owned by the
Reserve Bank of India, or worried about the payment of the
grocer’s bills. I belonged to the serenity of Nalapat. Nalapat
belonged to me. By abandoning it to the care of vulgar care-
takers and managers, I had hurt the spirit of the house. I HAD
UNWITTINGLY SPILT THE BLOOD OF ITS SPIRIT....

46

Only the wealthy hated me ... they
spread lush scandals about me

Towards the Slaughter-yard :

The Intensive Cardiac Care Unit

Is where the lidless fisheyes of bulbs burn on.

Blind to the night’s thinning out into light beyond the wall
And the day spilling itself out on crowding streets;

The intensive cardiac care unit

Is where the weary travellers pause to pitch a tent, the oasis
For a night’s rest before the long crossing
On camel-back through hot sand;

The intensive cardiac care unit
Is where each lies in his own white tent
Under harsh desert moons,

Buried only neck deep in sleep, so that with unhooded head
He awaits his execution,

And half-grown nightmares crouch under beds,

And moody as distant drums sound the heart beat;

The intensive cardiac care unit

Is where the tall dark doctor comes at midnight, visiting.

Called up from the depths of dreams, out of breath.

The bulbs blurring in his eyes, the aging faces blurring
On their pillows, while sleep grazes at his brow.

His great shoulders.

His knees, and like a vagrant cow nods its head and moves on....

Although I was a favourite with the students of my home-
state who supported my plea for a new kind of morality, I was
an eyesore to my relatives who thought me to be a threat to
their respectability.

178

MY STORY

They had grown up as components of the accursed feudal
system that prevailed in Malabar until two decades ago and
had their own awesome skeletons in the cupboards of the past.
Being members of affluent joint families, they had had ample
leisure to nurture their concupiscence, feeding it with the juices
of the tender daughters of their serfs and retainers. They feared
that I would write of their misdeeds, of the accidental deaths in
the locality and of the true immorality which takes shelter no-
where else but in the robust arms of our society.

They took their grievances to my parents who were embar-
rassed but totally helpless, for it had become clear to them that
I had become a truth-addict and that I loved my writing more
than I loved them or my own sons. If the need ever arose, I
would without hesitation bid goodbye to my doting husband
and to my sons, only to be allowed to remain what I was, a
writer.

I myself had no control over my writing which emerged like
a rash of prickly heat in certain seasons. A few of the elderly
men of my village came to visit me slyly, when the evening had
darkened and sat on the easychairs, smiling vacuously and in
silence. 1 had gone there without my husband and besides,
had I not confessed in my writings to have had a couple of love
affairs? They came with whetted appetites and looked like sick
hounds. I had to get my old maidservant to assist me in get-
ting rid of them without much fanfare.

My enemies increased in number day by day, although for
a few weeks, I was unaware. While I was away in Trivandrum,
acting as a judge on the Regional Film Awards Committee, they
buried an urn somewhere in my yard, hoping to kill me with
the rites of sorcery. I chose to ignore the warnings given by
my servants. One day I found on the ledge of our well, a deca-
pitated cat and on inspecting it minutely, I found my name
engraved on a copper piece, an egg, some turmeric and a lot of
stuff that resembled Vermillion stuffed inside its body. Then I
realized that I too should try some magic to scare my foes
away. I hung a picture of Kali on the wall of my balcony and
adorned it daily with long strings of red flowers, resembling the
intestines of a disembowelled human being. Anyone walking

KAMALA DAS

179

along the edge of my paddy field a furlong away, could see the
Goddess and the macabre splash of red. This gave the villagers
a fright.

I toyed with the idea of keeping a good watch-dog but could
not find one. I kept many servants, but finally, two of them
succumbed to bribes and attempted to poison me. There is a
basic decency in the poor which will prevent them from being
disloyal or cruel to one who has loved them. They could bring
themselves to administer poison only in insufiicient doses. I
saw the relief on their faces when I came down the stairs in the
morning, alive and more or less normal.

My servants loved me. The fieldhands loved me. Only the
wealthy hated me. They spread lush scandals about my way of
life.

In actuality, my life was simple and uncomplicated. In the
morning, ray maid brought up for me, a tray of tea things.
After tea, I went out to inspect my rice and my vegetables. I
fed my cows. Breakfast. After that, playing some game with
my little son until it was bath time, and my young maidservant
came to me with the henna for my palms and feet. An oil bath.
Prayers in the puja room where a Nambudiri Brahmin worship-
ped scientifically my three deities, Ganapati, Surya and Lakshmi.
Lunch at twelve and sleep until tea time, when the tray came up
the stairs, laden with tea and sweets, an hour of writing or of
the study of Sanskrit. Then downstairs, once again, to walk
under the trees with my son. Dinner at seven-thirty and read-
ing until nine.

Not even Mrs. Grundy would have found fault with my
morals, but the village talked in whispers of my lovers. Subtly
I was harassed until one night, I collapsed with a heart attack
and lay on the floor all damp like a baked fish. My child trunk-
called to my brother i Mohandas who came from Calicut, to
carry me to a nursing home.

In the car during the three hours’ journey, my child held
my hand and whimpered. I told myself that I was not prepared
to die. This beautiful child was not to be left motherless. My
paddy had to be harvested. I had only begun my career as an

180

MY STORY

agriculturist. At Calicut, I was admitted into a private nursing
home owned by one of the best heart-specialists of the country.
After the crisis was over, they removed me to a room that faced
the red road which I watched from my bed.

People passed by, wearing coloured clothes and occasionally
a car. There was a No Visitors sign on my door which kept
even death away, although I dreamt one afternoon that it came
to me disguised as a woodpecker and began to peck at my
bones. Then it changed itself into a water fowl, the kind I
used to see near the pond at Nalapat, while I was a child living
there with my grandmother, and then it ruffled the rivulets of
my blood, a little haemo-bird trapped in a migrant’s trance.

I woke up sweating. My maidservant told me that a young
man had come several times to the door wanting to see me. He
wants you to sign in his book, she said.

I heard his voice and liked its velvet thickness and so he was
called in. He was only a blur at the foot of my bed. What is
your name, I asked him. I am Mohan, he said, I am at a loss
for words. Be safe in your silence, Mohan, I wrote in his book
and envied him, his capacity for silence. With words, I had
destroyed my life. I had used them like swords in what was
meant to be a purification dance, but blood was unwittingly
shed. Next morning from the young man, there was a gift of
roses which came in many hues, including two of a pale helio-
trope which I fondled for a long while. The roses remained on
my window sill for three days. I wanted to see the man and
thank him for the happiness his flowers had given me, but he
did not appear again.

After three weeks of rest, I coaxed my doctor to send me
home, because it was the time of harvest and I wished to be
present, to glory in my achievement. While I was being driven
home, I saw near the mountain passes, the aged cattle being
taken to the slaughter yard. I saw their thin haunches and the
Vermillion brand on their shoulders.

I wanted to, just for one brief moment, get down from the
car and join them. Human beings are never branded with a
hot iron. They are only sent home with their electrocardio-
graphs and sedatives.

47

The sorcerer came on a bike at night. . .

From the debris of house- wrecks
Pick up my broken face.

Your bride^s face.

Changed a little with the years-
I shall not remember
The betrayed honeymoon;

We are both such cynics,

You and I.

If loving me was hard then
It's harder now
But love me one day
For a lark
Love the sixty-seven
Kilogrammes of aging flesh
Love the damaged liver.

The heart and its ischaemia.

Yes, love me one day
Just for a lark.

Show me what our life would have been
If only you had loved-...

After my return from the nursing home, life became difficult
for me. My eldest son who had come to be by my side during
my illness, fell ill, contracting measles from my little son. Both
were delirious with the high fever and I saw on their faces an
ominous glaze.

I still hugged to my left side the pain I went to the hospital
with, and to eat the sedatives prescribed for me, I was not
willing. I wanted to remain awake and vigilant at the bedside

182

MY STORY

of my son who stared at me with unseeing eyes mottled by red
veins.

In the village there was no ice to be had, to lower his tem-
perature. All I could do was place a wet cloth on his forehead
and remove it when it dried. I grew panicky and soon was so
demoralised that I took my maid’s advice and summoned a
sorcerer to find out if our enemies were bringing us such mis-
fortune.

The sorcerer came on a bike at night displaying his glossy
smile. He was taken up to the balcony where he drew a dia-
gram and spread out his cowrie shells to begin his esoteric cal-
culations. He was a young man of a robust build with wavy
hair and a gleaming skin. He wore round his neck a thick
chain of gold with a round locket. He gave me three strings,
one for my wrist and the others for my sons. They have done
Mahamaran to kill you, he said, but we shall try to save your
children.

I gave him Rs. 20 for his words of assurance and sent him
away. The strings were tied round the wrists of my sons who
were too weak to protest. But towards dawn, after having
debated within for six sleepless hours, I cut them and threw
them out of the window. Finally, Tetracycline cured my sons.

I could hardly walk for the ache that remained like a sickle
imbedded in my left breast. So I sent a message to my hus-
band who came at once from Bombay to be with us. When I
heard his heavy footfalls on the stairs, I clapped my hands in
sheer happiness. I was going to be secure again. The little son
told him, take us with you to Bombay, or else we will surely
die here...

Leaving the property to the care of a cousin and a servant,

I left once more for Bombay. I had had enough of eKperiment-
ing and was definitely desirous of settling down to a normal
life. My son who had been a victim of chronic Rheumatic
fever, had improved with two years of taking Penicillin. He
himself suggested that we send him to a school. He wanted
us to find for him a kind school unlike the one he had once
been attending, where the teachers were impersonal and curt.

KAMALA DAS

183

My husband chose the Dunne Institute and admitted him in the
fourth standard.

He came home with great excitement. Amma, my teacher
is very kind to me, he said and I embraced him from my bed,
grateful to God for this mercy. The child liked all his teachers
and even on days when he felt ill, he egged me to send him to
school. During the weekends he edited a mini-mag which he
called Oushanasa where he wrote verses and stories under diffe-
rent pen-names.

I learnt for the first time to be miserly with my energy,
spending it only on my writing, which I enjoyed more than any-
thing else in the world. I typed sitting propped against pillows
on my wide bed. Large areas of my ignorance had been oblit-
erated by the lessons I had learnt from my life and I wanted my
readers to know of it. I had realized by then that the writer
has none to love her but the readers. She would have proved
herself to be a mere embarrassment to the members of her
family, for she is like a goldfish in a well-lit bowl whose move-
ments are never kept concealed.

I have often wished to take myself apart and stick all the
bits, the heart, the intestines, the liver, the reproductive organs,
the skin, the hair and all the rest on a large canvas to form a
collage which could then be donated to my readers. I have no
secrets at all. Each time I have wept, the readers have wept
with me. Each time I walked to my lover’s houses dressed
like a bride, my readers have walked with me. I have felt their
eyes on me right from my adolescence when I published my first
story and was called controversial. Like the eyes of an all-see-
ing God they follow me through the years.

Illness and my writing helped me to turn into an island.
People had to go out of their way to visit me. In canoes they
came and in yachts. My prayers and its corollaries of silent
meditation helped me to become vaguely telepathic. If some-
one walked into my drawing room who did not like me, I sensed
the secret hostility and refused to see him, or her. I withdrew
my head into my quilt and remained in my closed bedroom
which was also my workroom.

184

MY STORY

I wanted only love and kindness. Hate of any kind would
ruin my work. I did not have even the little strength needed
to brush my hair. There was no wisdom in wasting my strength
in sitting on a sofa talking with people who secretly disliked me
but came out of curiosity. By and by, all the non-intellectuals
began to stay away. Only genuine friends arrived in my house
to see me. They brought me glad tidings and peace.

I typed nearly a thousand words a week. I wrote about the
subjects the editors asked me to write on, fully aware that I was
uneducated by the usual standards and that I had no business
meddling in grave matters. But how happily I meddled to satisfy
that particular brand of readers who liked me and liked my
honest approach. I was useless as a housewife anyway. I could
not pick up a teapot without gasping for breath. But writing
was possible. And it certainly brought me happiness.

48

The ancient hungers that once tormented me

were fulfilled

When you learn to swim
Do not enter a river that has no ocean
To flow into, one ignorant of destinations
And knowing only the flowing as its destiny.

Like the weary rivers of the blood
That bear the scum of ancient memories,

But go, swim in the sea.

Go swim in the great blue sea.

Where the first tide you meet is your body.

That familiar pest.

But if you learn to cross it.

You are safe, yes, beyond it you are safe.

For even sinking would make no difference then...

During the long weeks of my convalescence I was obsessed
with the recollections of my childhood days spent at Nalapat.
The hazy siesta banked in the heart of little pills prescribed to
quieten the flutter of my heart was bruised with the voices of
the dead and with the sights once familiar to me at Nalapat.

For hours I had played in the sunlit pond behind the house
flailing the water with my girl-thin limbs, while the turtles moved
about in its hostile depths and eels stared at me with their opal
eyes but in all those unfenced hours I had felt no fear, nor even
joy but an anonymous peace.

My dreams as always glowed pearl-white, they seemed hardly

186

MY STORY

mortal, but as evening came, snake-like I shed their silver coils
and woke to meet an alien world that talked of casual sins. I
had desired to possess the sense, the courage to pick myself an
average identity, to age through years of earthy din gently like a
cut flower until it was time to be removed, but I had wandered,
fog-eyed, seeking another, to be mine, my own to love or destroy
and to share with me the dimlit gloom where I moved like a
fawn.

1 was physically destroyed beyond resurrection. But while
my body lay inert on my sick bed, my mind leapt up like a
waking greyhound and became alert. It had said goodbye to
its sleep. All the ancient hungers that had once tormented my
lithe body were fulfilled. Not even the best-looking man in the
world would any longer arouse in me an appetite for love.

If my desires were lotuses in a pond, closing their petals at
dusk and opening out at dawn once upon a time, they were
now totally dead, rotted and dissolved, and for them there was
no more to be a re- sprouting. The pond had cleared itself of
all growth. It was placid.

If my parents had talked to me and pointed out the wrong
path and the right, I would still have led the life I led. I sin-
cerely believe that knowledge is exposure to life. I could never
bring myself to hang my life on the pegs of quotations for safety.
I never did play safe. I compromised myself with every sentence
I wrote and thus I burnt all the boats that would have reached
me to security.

What did I finally gain from life ? Only the vague hope that
there are a few readers vvho have loved reading my books al-
though they have not wished to inform me of it. It is for each
of them that I continue to write, although the abusive letters
keep pouring in. I tweak the noses of the puritans but I am
that corny creature, the sad clown, w'ho knows that the perfor-
mance is over and that the audiences are safely tucked in their
beds with all their laughter now forgotten. Their domestic
worries have taken over.

Where is the time for them to remember the jokes and the
footlights of the stage ? Some of iny Communist friends ask me

KAMALA DAS

187

what I have done in my life for the common man. Should I not
have written with a social conscience ? Should I not have
written solely of the poor and the downtrodden ? I remain
silent.

The poor emerge out of invisible holes in the morning bear-
ing the burden of their hunger and wander around looking for
edible garbage. I watch them when I am well enough to stand
in my verandah.

I watch the young woman who is mad, being tormented by
loafers while she lies asleep at the foot of a tree, half-clad. I
notice the passing days wrinkle her face and emaciate her once
plump body. Whose daughter is she ? Where has she misplaced
her parents ? On some mornings she appears naked, saunter-
ing past our house with a smile on her lips, and we thr'ow her
a housecoat or a saree which she accepts without once looking
up to see the giver, nonchalantly, as though she had expected
the sky to rain down on her head only soft garments.

I watch the little boys of the poor crowding round the
bhelpuriwala's handcart, only to have the pleasure of watching
the richer ones eat. I have seen their wise eyes and their lengthy
contemplation. The poor are fatalists by nature and by tradition.
Or else where would we be now, the selfish, self-centred ones,
obsessed by our weight problems, our tax problems and our
colour problems ?

The poor would have risen like a locust storm and devoured
us by now; they would have picked our over-ripened flesh from
the bones and left us in scraps on the garbage heaps. Yes, I do
see the writing on the w'all, although it is very faint. I shudder
for one moment but I shudder in delicious anticipation.

The ailing have a lot of time to ponder over the grave issues
of the world. I do very little work. Once or twice my hand
may sweep a duster over my writing desk. I may comb my long
hair to unsnarl it before going to bed at night. But always like
an inexpensive timepiece ticking away merrily, loudly, my
brain goes a-ticking. I draw out plans of action which I hope
to convey to the rulers of the country.

I plan to organize a campaign to collect a rupee from every

1S8

MY STORY

middle-class home to build low-cost tenements where the slum-
dwellers can be housed so that we may see their children grow up
healthy and without that utter hopelessness dimming their
young eyes. I plan to request the hoteliers to set aside one-tenth
of their income to feed the poor every day.

As President of the Jyotsna Arts and Education Society, I
climb the stage occasionally to talk to the public of my dream
of starting a residential school based on the Gurukul system
where we shall get teachers from many countries, hand-picked
ones with a sense of dedication, each of whom will live as a
parent with ten of the pupils in one of the many cottages set
aside for the school.

Nobody comes forward to turn these dreams to reality. The
world outside my house is always so busy catching buses,
balancing the accounts in large ledgers, lobbying for de-classed
politicians, pimping for the impotent and hiding their ill-gotten
wealth in concealed lockers in the W.C.

None has asked me what I think of Indira Gandhi, of
Kissinger or of Jayaprakash Narayan. I am told to think
of God and to try and make peace with Him so that I may not
have the raw deal that I have had here up there too, but an
easier time.

49

Who were we to sit beside their favourite God ?

The cicadas in brambled foliage
Naturally concave. So also these
Men who climb up the cogged scaflFoldings
Building houses for the alien rich.

On some days the hot sky flings at us scraps
Of Telugu songs and we intently
Listen, but we wait in vain for the harsh
Message of the lowly. In merry tunes
Their voices break, but just a little, as
Though the hero’s happiness is too big
A burden on their breath, too big a lie
For their throats to swallow, but past sunset
Their jests sound ribald, their lust seems robust.

Puny these toy-men of dust, fathers of light
Dust-children, but their hands like the withered boughs
Of some mythic hoodoo tree cast only
Cool shadows, and with native grace bestow
Even on unbelievers vast shelters....

When I was a young woman living at Cuffe Parade, there
were no buildings at Nariman Point but only the sea, marshy in
the little coves, but clean and blue in the distance where a boat
or two swung gently on its waves. Later the sea was forced to
recede, reminding one of a receding hairline, and on the land
reclaimed tall buildings were constructed.

The builders in Bombay are chiefly those of Andhra Pradesh
who have by now become domiciles and speak Marathi with
their children. They are dark wiry people with loud voices and

190

MY STORY

a running gait that tells the watcher how they value time and
are always in a hurry. When a building is being constructed
they live on its precincts in huts made of mud-bricks and corru-
gated iron.

Beyond the ministers’ cottages and behind the large^ new
structures is a colony where the builders live. It is a tiny village
in itself with dirt roads and milch goats tethered to poles and a
well where the women gather with pots in the evenings.

During the week dedicated to the worship of Lord Ganesha,
the inhabitants erect a rude stage and instal an idol. Then there
is loud music in the evenings after the work is over and the
bath and the cooking. Some of them use little cymbals of brass
and clang-clang to the tune of the hymns while the round-eyed
children squat on the ground and watch in admiration.

From the houses nearby the upper middle classes protest
vehemently, for they do not wish such plebian exuberance to
spoil their tranquil hours. They wish to have their evening
whiskey in peace, talking of books and love affairs and office
promotions. If there is to be music let it be that of Balamurali
or Kumar Gandharva.

The poor are bad singers. Their voices grate as though the
dust of their surroundings have entered their throats and their
lungs. But no complaint can stop the house builders from
enjoying themselves during the Ganesh festival. The men drink
hard, and raise their voices in His praise. The song rises like
a tired snake who has finally reconciled itself to its destiny
which is to uncurl out of the snake charmer’s basket and sway.

Even while the cultured voices discussed poetry inside my
drawing room, I heard that song and sensed the joy of the
singers. Finally, unable to control myself any longer I dragged
my husband to the colony one evening to see the ones who were
singing. The people on the platform dipped their voices when
they saw us enter. We were outsiders but we were anyway
welcome. How happily the children smiled at us ! Sit down,
said one of the organizers, an old toothless man, pointing to the
platform. Who were we to sit beside their favourite God ? I
felt humbled by their good-will.

KAMALA DAS

191

We sat on the ground with the children, who had all been
given baths and were gleaming like rosewood carvings. The
singers became self-conscious for a while but then they relaxed
to sing as loud as before. What did they have in their lives to
be so happy about ? I was pining for yet another settee for
the drawing-room while these grand men and women were
working from morning till dusk carrying cement and climbing
the scaffoldings. And yet they had more vitality than I had and
more of optimism. I returned home with the awareness that
I had led a paltry existence, thinking only of my drawing room’s
furniture and of my loved ones.

How vast really was my world ! My gloom lay in its littlest
corner like a black dog. I had had the idiocy to think of myself
as Kamala, a being separate from all the rest and with a destiny
entirely different from those of others.

The idea of our world being round and our life being a cycle
has tripped us up. If we were to forget the words past, present
and future and were to see life as a collage, a vast assembly of
things and people and emotions we shall stop grieving for the
dead, stop pining for the living and stop accumulating visible
wealth.

What exists must exist. Only the compositions will change.
Tomorrow my soul might migrate into the womb of a house-
builder’s woman and I might be one of the happy children
squatting to see the pink Ganapati. Both happiness and un-
happiness are mine to enjoy. I have no end. Nothing has an
end. Instead of an end, all that we suffer is a discomposition.

Often I have toyed with the idea of drowning myself to be
rid of my loneliness which is not unique in anyway but is
natural to all. I have wanted to find rest in the sea and an
escape from involvements. But rest is a childish fancy, a very
minor hunger. The sharks’ hunger is far greater than mine.

There is a hunger in each of us to feed other hungers, the
basic one, to crumble and dissolve and to retain in other things
the potent fragments of oneself. But ultimately we shall dis-
cover that we are immortal and that the only mortal things are
systems and arrangements.

192

MY STORY

Even our pains shall continue in those who have devoured
us. The oft-repeated moves of every scattered cell shall give
no power to escape from cages of involvement. We are trap-
ped in immortality and our only freedom is the freedom to
discompose

50

I have ceased to fear death. . .

Two months ago an eminent cardiologist of Bombay, who is
a friend of ours, dropped in at my place in the afternoon to take
my E.C.G. He told me with great solicitude that I ought to re-
move myself to the Intensive Cardiac Unit of a nearby hospital
as soon as I could, unless I wished to die in a short while, de-
teriorating in health day by day, until my feet and my face
turned swollen, and I became too helpless to move out of my
bed.

He held my hand in his and added that he would not have
cautioned me so bluntly if I were less intelligent, less brave.
Weep if you must, he said, but pack your things before the
evening and get your husband to bring you to the hospital.
Then he lit a cigarette.

I remained silent. I did not want to tell him that I woke
from my bed on some days with a puffincss beneath my eyes
and that I had fainted several times during my morning prayers,
sitting cross-legged for nearly an hour, reciting my mantras and
collapsing suddenly in a heap on the floor.

Whenever my feet swelled up I tucked them beneath the folds
of my sari. Whenever I felt a great wringing pain at my side
or in my left arm I thrust a Sorbitrate tablet under my tongue
and felt its warmth dilating my arteries. I was no stranger to
the many signals of warning. But going once again to the
hospital was an unpleasant prospect.

I have always regarded the hospital as a planet situated like
a sandwich filling between the familiar earth and the strange

194

MY STORY

domain of death. Each time I have been admitted into a hos-
pital-room I have been seized with an acute desire to be left
alone. At that moment I am like a honeymooner who desires
total privacy for herself and her mate.

Illness has become my mate, bound by ties of blood and
nerves and bone, and, I hold with it, long secret conversations.

1 tell my heart disease that I have just entered my forties and
that my little son still sleeps with his right thumb in his mouth
and the left hand tucked inside my nightie, between my breasts.

I tell it that my ancestral home, now under repair, is still
unplastered because of the cement shortage and that I would like
to live in it for at least a year before my death. I entreat the
illness to quieten the ache at my side...

Soon after the admission, the honorary chosen to take care
of you, the knight-errant prescribed to fight your battles with the
dragon of death, comes to your bedside and undresses you with
the help of a nurse, trying to locate the unmanifested symptoms,
which in due course will build up for him the ultimate diagnosis.
At the touch of his hands your body blushes purple.

Outside your door he talks solemnly with your loved ones.
You only hear an incoherent murmur. Besides, by then you
would have ceased to care. You have become a mere number.
Along with your clothes, which the nurse took off, was removed
your personality-traits. Then the pathologist’s henchmen rush
at you for specimens of your blood, sputum, urine and bowel-
movement.

With all those little jamjars filled and sealed, every vestige
of your false dignity is thus removed. In the X’Ray room, an-
other nurse unwraps your body while the wardboy who wheel-
ed you in watches furtively from the dark. The display of
breasts is the legitimate reward for his labour.

A booming voice orders you to take a deep, deep breath,
and lying on the ice-cold X’Ray table you feel secretly amused
because you would not have been here at all if taking a deep
breath was that easy but you would be walking hand in hand
with your little son or seeing a film or picnicking under a fra-
grant tree.

KAMALA DAS

195

No, I will not dream of going back to a hospital, I said to
the doctor. He gave a friendly shrug. The room was filled with
his cigarette-smoke.

It is not that I am afraid of the injections and the drips and
all the rest, I said. It is just that I have stopped fearing death...

I have been for years obsessed with the idea of death. I
have come to believe that life is a mere dream and that death
is the only reality. It is endless, stretching before and beyond
our human existence. To side into it will be to pick up a new
significance. Life has been, despite all emotional involvements,
as ineffectual as writing on moving water. We have been mere
participants in someone else’s dream.

I am at peace. I liken God to a tree which has as its parts
the leaves, the bark, the fruits and the flowers each unlike the
other in appearance and in texture but in each lying dissolved
the essence of the tree, the whatness of it. Quiditus. Each com-
ponent obeys its own destiny. The flowers blossom, scatter
pollen and dry up. The fruits ripen and fall. The bark peels.
Each of us shall obey that colossal wisdom, the taproot of all
wisdom and the source of all consciousness.

I have left colourful youth behind. Perhaps I mixed my
pleasures as carelessly as I mixed my drinks and passed out too
soon on the couch of life. But does it matter at all? I have
turned weary and frigid. My heart resembles a cracked platter
that can no more hold anything. But at daybreak lovers still
cling at doorways with wet eyes, wet limbs, speaking the words
I once spoke.

Perhaps I shall die soon. The jewellery I adorn my body
with, in order to look like a bride awaiting her love, shall sur-
vive me. The books I have collected, the bronze idols I have
worshipped with flowers and all the trinkets stored in my life-
time shall endure, but not I.

Out of my pyre my grieving sons shall pick up little souve-
nirs of bones and some ash. And yet the world shall go on.
Tears shall dry on my sons’ cheeks. Their wives shall bring
forth brilliant children. My descendants shall pppti,]^^'Vtlo«|>'^
earth- It is enough for me. It is more than enougl^’.^^^C^ltJs^